LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ' 



Shelf. /~//6 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



Valley of the Shadow. 



EIGHT SERMONS 



On the Doctrine of Future Punishment, 



BY 

CHARLES H. HALL, D.D. 



At last I heard a Voice upon the slope 

Cry to the summit, '" Is there any hope? " 

To which an answer pealed from that high land, 

But in a tonsue no man could understand : 

And on the glimmering summit, far withdrawn, 

God made Himself an awful rose of dawn. 

Ten7iyson, 

Non parvum est, scire quod nescias. 

Jerome. 



NEW YORK: 
T. WHIT TAKE R, 

2 Bible House. 
1878. 




/I 



^'\%'^^ 

W's 



Co PYRIGHT, 
I878, 

By CHARLES H. HALL. 




Kew York : J. J. Little & Co., Printers , 
10 to 20 Astor riace. 



DEDICATION. 



First, to every Christian man or woman, who has stood by 
the cold remains of relative or friend, and felt one doubt as to 
his acceptance with the Judge of all the earth ; to such chiefly, 
with most earnest sympathy for them, and in hope that they 
may find some clue of consolation in these pages : next, to every 
soul that, by the prejudice of religious education, the torrent of 
surrounding opinions, or by misplaced confidence in the devices 
and learned disquisitions of even good men, is prompted to dark 
and gloomy thoughts of the Son of Mary, to doubt his own right 
to go to Him for sympathy and cleansing ; and, lastly, to those 
whose sins cry out upon them, and whose hearts are filled with 
the pains of fear and remorse ; with a prayer for them that they 
may learn that it is the goodness of God that leads men to repent- 
ance, this little book is affectionately presented by the 

AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 



TOURING the past winter the mind of the com- 
-■— ^ munity of Brooklyn was suddenly and pro- 
foundly excited on the subject of the doctrine 
with which these discourses deal. The exciting 
causes were the sermon of the eloquent preacher 
of Plymouth Church, and the sermon about the 
same time of Dr. Farrar in Westminster Abbey 
in London. The author kept himself entirely 
aloof from any participation in the discussions 
which followed, and, after reading the two ser- 
mons when printed, kept silence, even from good 
words upon the subject, until, forced by a sense 
of duty to his own flock, he felt that he could not 
with a clear conscience refrain from a declaration 
of his own views. 

Warned by the events which followed the pub- 
lication of the two sermons, he asked of his con- 
gregation, to avoid any expression of opinion 
concerning his views, until they had heard him to 
the end. He would respectfully make the same 
request of the readers of this book. He is aware 

5 



6 PREFACE. 

of the defects of his presentation of the subject 
which will call for a charitable construction, and 
knows fully the meagerness and hurry which 
rnark portions of his argument. He deplores the 
fact, that he is not able in eight discourses to deal 
at all reputably with a subject, which others de- 
cide peremptorily in one. There is hardly a 
point in the argument, which he would not gladly 
expand and improve, but must content himself 
with the hope, that if his views are of any value 
to others, they will suggest to them the proper 
lines of study and reflection. 

He feels it due to himself to state, that he did 
not read a word of the many sermons which were 
kindly sent to him, until after he had put the last 
link in his own chain of argument : especially that, 
with the exception above made, he did not read 
a word of the writings of the author of the work 
on Eternal Hope, He does not, therefore, now 
remove from his own pages, what that impas- 
sioned author has said to the same effect. While 
these sermons have been on their way through 
the press, he has added here and there a brief 
note, for which he is indebted to Dr. Farrar. 

These sermons make a broad issue with the 
common doctrines of hell and its endless tor- 
ments. The reader will judge for himself, whe- 



PREFACE. 7 

ther they give him anything restful and satisfac- 
tory in place of them. Some will resent them as 
false to the venerable teachings which claim the 
proud title of orthodox ; and others, who have 
long lost all faith in the old, may discover that 
their doubts have grounds in reason and Scrip- 
ture. 

It is fair to state briefly, and in terms as unob- 
jectionable as possible, what is conceived to be 
the common system which is faulted : 

1. Original sin, Adam sinned against the In- 
finite. The sin was therefore infinite. It was in- 
finite in vileness, in loss, and in guilt. 

2. Total depravity, Adam transmitted this in- 
finite sin to every one of his descendants. There 
is no division or diminution in the infinite. There 
can be no degrees. Every child of Adam inherits 
his infinite sin, loss, and guilt in all its absolute, 
total infiniteness. 

3. Atonement, Only an Infinite Being can com- 
pass or cope with this original sin. Christ must 
be the Son of God to make the atonement for 
it. Only God can inaugurate the steps by which 
this infinity of good is made over to a sinner. 

4. Imputed righteousness. No finite act of any 
sinner can come into comparison with his infinite 
depravity. Such act has only finite considera- 



8 PREFACE. 

tions. The infiniteness of pardon is made over 
to the sinner from Christ, as a free donation, on 
motives known only to the Infinite. The ''■ robe '' 
of infinity is thrown over the sinner by Christ 
alone. 

5. The unconverted. Without this benefaction 
every child of Adam is held by nature under the 
curse of total depravity, and tho ban of infinite 
guilt. This applies to infants as much as to 
adults — as it is Adam's original act, which is the 
one cause of the guilt to all. The guilt of an 
infant is infinite — that of a Judas is infinite. 

6. Hell-torments, They are the co-ordinate of 
this sense of the infinite in every man's inherited 
guilt. They must be infinite in kind, degree, and 
duration. It is the element of the infinite which 
alone clears this logic of any weakness. The dis- 
tinction therefore of these torments into either 
(a) material — reaching the body as well as the soul 
— or (b) immaterial, those affecting the soul only, 
is utterly false and delusive. For they must be in- 
finite. Infinite in kind — they must include every 
conceivable kind of punishment of infinite wrath 
directed by infinite ingenuity and power. They 
are not of the devil's creation ; they are the devised 
penalty of Omniscient Goodness. If material fires 
can be supposed to distract the attention of the 



PREFACE. g 

soul a whit, and deaden remorse, then, that be- 
comes an argument why the material fire is to 
beMenied. But if "twin hells" can include any 
agony, which one alone would lack, then they must 
be accepted, for it is the element of in^mty in kind 
which logic demands. They are infinite in degree 
— all picturings of horrible scenery can be only 
child's-play to the immeasurable reality. Ex neces- 
sitate they also must be infinite in duration. Abso- 
lute eternity of evil must be accepted as the conse- 
quence of the first idea of Adam's sin and Christ's 
atonement. No person holding the two terms as 
stated above of Original Sin and Total Depravity, 
can come to the discussion of the last term but in 
the spirit of a foregone conclusion. If in the pun- 
ishment there is imagined the slightest alleviation 
of kind, degree, or duration, it detracts just so much 
from the Original Sin of Adam. But there can be 
no degree in the mfinite. This is the system which 
claims to be ^'teres, totus atque rottmdus'' — and in 
a terrible sense it is so, beyond dispute. 

Many readers will say to us : "I do not hold to 
that system." Probably not. Possibly very few 
can be found now to do it when stated in its naked- 
ness. But this is the iron tower, which has been 
builded in the past, in whose adamantine safe is 
locked the key to this Bastile. This is the Gospel 



10 PREFACE. 

which, as an eloquent Presbyterian divine of our 
country has said, ^^ is Hke the light-house on a stern 
and rock-bound coast, intended by its Creator to 
light the way of the elect over the stormy ocean 
of life to the haven where they would be, while the 
rest of mankind, like the wild sea-birds, can only 
dash themselves against its cold, unfeeling walls, 
and perish in the waves/' Calvin found the ele- 
ments of it in the Augustinian doctrines, which, 
until his time, had been largely restrained and nul- 
lified by the powerful opposing influences of the 
Catholic Church, and he set them up in their na- 
kedness, without those restraining influences, and 
bound them into coherency v/ith the Titan forces 
of his logic. It, at one time, prevailed in England, 
and was passed over to this land, to receive new 
forces from Jonathan Edwards, Hopkins, and 
Emmons, and others of that class. It taught Dr. 
Emmons to say,''^ ^' the happiness of the elect will 
in part consist in watching the torments of the 
damned, and among them of their own children 
and dearest friends, and yet they will sing Halle- 
lujah.*' It sent tide warm blood flowing in the 
heart of Dr. Spring in gratitude at ^^ the glory, 
when He, who hung on Calvary, shall cast those 

* See letter of Miss C. E. Beecher, in the Tribtme of March 9, 

1878. 



PREFACE, II 

who have trodden His blood under their feet, into 
a furnace of fire." It prompted Dr. Edwards to 
ask of sinners: *^ You cannot stand an instant be- 
fore an infuriated tiger ; what then will you do, 
when God rushes against you in all his wrath ? " 
It is to-day the real substructure of the common 
dogma. 

Possibly few persons dare now go the lengths 
of the old-time logic — who yet hold to the dogma 
of hell in all its fierceness and intolerableness. 
The worse for them. It was this logic which gave 
it an excuse. We pardon at last the Spanish in- 
quisitor of the days of Philip II., who was only 
acting according to the spirit of his age ; but we 
should regard him to-day in our own land, as little 
removed from something worse than a tiger. One 
entertains respect for the system, when it had 
power to command the unquestioning faith of men, 
in all its great salient points. But, now, if a man 
informs us, that he is not influenced by the pre- 
cedent logic, and that he shrinks from the present- 
ment of the real points which made the system 
respectable, but holds to the worst and most hateful 
of them all, we fail to find his position honorable. 
It is much as if one should still insist on putting 
men to the rack and burning them at the stake,i 
while confessing that he saw no reason for it. 



12 PREFACE. 

Those older men were terribly in earnest in all 
things— as terribly so in this dogma of hell. We 
are not. Our thrills and exhortations are dramatic 
and speculative. For one the author feels com- 
pelled to protest against the whole system from 
its first postulate to the last. The only earnest- 
ness which he feels able to claim, is in the two 
assertions which, like lines of rock, seem to him to 
run along above the dark fogs of limitless thought 
on this subject, and to inclose the Valley of the 
Shadow between them — one^ that the judgment of 
the Saviour of men will always be final, thorough, 
and just : the other ^ that in its absolute or philo- 
sophical sense, evil cannot be eternal. Other and 
better eyes may penetrate this outer darkness, 
and see through to the bottom of this Valley. May 
Christ keep us all, gentle reader, from other than 
speculative knowledge of what may be there. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



DISCOURSE PAGE 

I. The Valley of the Shadow 15 

II. The Word Gehenna 34 

III. The Work of Augustine 50 

IV. Eternal — its Uses 70 

V. The Doctrine of the Old Testament 89 

VI. The Doctrine of the New Testament .108 

VII. The Use of the Prayer-Book 128 

VIII. The Appeal to Conscience 149 

Appendix 173 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

Luke, xii. 5. — But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: 
Fear him, which after he hath killed, hath power to cast into 
hell ; yea, I say unto you, Fear him,^ 

T T is our first duty to do justice to the idea 
•^ which is presented in this text. After we 
have seen and appreciated just what it says, we 
can properly raise the general question of the place 
to which it refers. It appears from the passage, 
that a multitude was gathered together around 
Christ, the new prophet of Galilee, insomuch that 
they trode one upon another: it is also evident 
that they were an excited crowd. The mo- 
tive of active fear of the opinions and the pos- 
sible violences of what we call the world, came 
naturally to the surface. It is plain that the 
teacher of the few unknown disciples, took the 
opportunity to impress on their minds the two 
contrasted fears of men — one, the fear of men in 



^ Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn, Feb- 
ruary 10, 1878. 

15 



1 6 THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

the majority, men in authority, men hardened by 
prejudice, men estabhshed in places of power and 
able to disgrace and destroy innovators and re- 
formers ; and the other, the fear of the unseen, 
far-off Being, who often seems to work slowly, 
silently, and after much patient delay. 

The disciples of Christ were amazed, beyond 
doubt, at the exceeding rashness of their Teacher, 
as he puts himself in uncompromising opposition 
to the rulers who were then sitting in Moses' seat. 
'^ Woe unto you. Scribes, Pharisees, Lawyers, hy- 
pocrites ! '' He seemed to be rushing headlong on 
his own destruction.^ His awful denunciations 
of their old and reputable Rabbis, the Scribes, 
and Pharisees, which were so unlike his usual 
gentle and charitable spirit, made them tremble 
for his safety. Men had been hurried to death 
in Jerusalem for language far less offensive than 
that which he had just used. It was only be- 
cause his very violence had swept the venerable 
hypocrites before him, that they did not raise 
the cry of blasphemy, and hurry him outside the 
city walls and stone him to death for his crime. 



* ** And as he said these things, the Pharisees began to urge 
him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak many things, lay- 
ing in wait for him and seeking to catch something out of his mouth 
that they might accuse him." — Ltike, xi. 53, 54. 



THE VALLE V OF THE SHADO IV. 



17 



Hence the great, or as the writer has it, ^^ the in- 
numerable multitude of people," in their excite- 
ment treading on each other, surging hither and 
thither with varying emotions, were astonished as 
they listened to the bold, the unexpected, and 
terrible language of this extraordinary gage of de- 
fiance flung down before the rulers by the Prophet 
of Galilee. It is just on this critical balancing- 
crest of the wave, that we are obliged to look at 
the Son of man in the text. It is just here that 
he rings out the contrast of the fear of mankind ; 
the fear of the world in all its varieties, fear of 
mobs, of tyrants, Annases, Neros, Domitians, fear 
of opinions, hates, sneers, any and all of them, 
shaded off as they run through the gamut of the 
passions on the one side — and that side then 
frightfully present in the low^ering looks of the 
angry Pharisees whose ears are tingling and sting- 
ing with the woes which he had just spoken 
against them. The cover of this fear is hypocrisy, 
in all its shapes, from the open lie and intentional 
deceit, to the gentle, polite shadings of policy, 
of prudent silences, of half-and-half opinions, and 
generalizations that may mean this or that, as you 
give them varying emphasis. Now, says the Mas- 
ter in effect, ^^ I mean to drive you and all my 
disciples out of all this courteous sheltering and 



1 8 THE UALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

hiding of the great thoughts which I leave with 
you. There is nothing of any purpose about me 
and my Gospel which is covered that shall not be 
revealed ; nothing hid, that shall not be made 
known. Things spoken in darkness shall be heard 
in the light. Things whispered in the secrecy of 
the closets shall be proclaimed as by a loud- 
shouting herald upon the house-tops.'' All other 
truth, like salt that had lost its savor and become 
inert, might lie in philosophic serenity in the 
writings of the wise of this world. There was to 
be a livmgness in all teachings and thinkings of 
the Christian which belonged properly to him as 
a Christian, which, like salt, must act and must 
repel corruption — and therefore could not in its 
own nature be concealed ; could not escape the 
hostility of the evil world. No ship of war was 
ever more evidently cleared for action than this. 
The disciples must have wondered and trembled 
at his strangeness, his novel exhibition of rash- 
ness, if they did not in their hearts think it vio- 
lence of spirit. Men sometimes talk of Jesus as 
having been all-filled with the soft enthusiasms 
of human gentleness. I tell you that there was 
something more than that in him. He often be- 
trays the consciousness that he came to send 
*^ not peace, but a sword.'' These words of his in 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. iq 

the text are responsible for all they have done 
since. They have armed men in steel. They 
have sharpened their swords, and sent them on 
fatal crusades. They have soothed the dying 
martyr at the stake, as his hot breath fled along 
the only temporary hell that the wrath of men 
could kindle here on earth, to rise on the wings of 
this contrast and see far down below him forever 
the flames of the lurid abysses from which he was 
rescued by his faith in them. I remind you that 
Christ also appeared to one of those men, as the 
terrible Leader of armies, as a rider on a white 
horse, a -warrior clothed in armor, and with ves- 
ture dipped in blood, and on his thigh his name 
written. Lord of lords, and King of kings. It is 
philosophically required of the Nicene faith, that 
the Son of God should have in himself whatever 
answers to all that is in God. A Socinian's 
model teacher may be all a pastoral shepherd, but 
not the Christ of the Church. The wrath of na- 
ture at all sinners against her laws, and the thun- 
ders of Sinai which really echoed that idea, must 
meet in him who took the title of Emmannel, or 
God-wiih-us. As "God of God, and Light of 
Light," he must have in him the hot fire-blasts of 
Sodom's tragedy and the thunder-tones of Sinai's 
crags, as well as the pastoral simplicity of the 



20 THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW, 

Nazarene peasant, and the uncomplaining meek- 
ness of the Sufferer of the Via Dolorosa. He, 
who is at last to judge the world in righteous- 
ness, must then be seen to justify his own lan- 
guage, for all his servants who have been bat- 
tling with the rage of evil men, in the faith of 
these words of the text. 

Now, it is in contrast to this most real and ter- 
rible of human fears, the fear of death by violence 
and tyranny, that Jesus introduces the text. If 
one can believe that Christ opposes a fact with a 
fancy; a real, dark tide of bloody persecutions, 
dragonnades, Smithfield fires, and massacres of St. 
Bartholomew, with a dream of semi-Persian and 
Israelitish philosophy, then he must square his re- 
spect for his model with his sense of religious con- 
sistency as he can. I leave him to do it at his 
leisure. 

Believing in the Nicene faith, I hear Christ here 
saying: ''But I, who deHberately cast you out on 
this crisis, forbidding you to be politic and soft 
in combating the sins of men, or wise after the 
shrewd examples of other teachers, I forewarn you 
whom ye shall fear : fear him whose hands hold 
the key of the bottomless pit, whose power really 
begins to be felt when your life is ended.'' Now, 
take the thought of hell out of the Christian reve- 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOV/. 2 1 

lation altogether, and where do you leave all that 
noble army of martyrs, who have chosen to fear it 
more than the wrath of men ? I am not now deny- 
ing room for some awful questionings along the 
whole line of the subject. I think that religious 
quacks have been treating men with a frightful 
sort of heroic treatment, as the physicians call it, 
and that the excitement in the public mind on this 
theme, which is now existing around us, is in part 
due to their previous mistakes. Our religious di- 
visions incline many ignorant preachers to resort 
to all manner of stimulations in commending their 
own side of sectarian questions, till men are right 
in the suspicion that these quackeries are really 
misrepresenting the religion of the Son of Mary. 
They certainly do, in my judgment. But the rem- 
edy is not to be found in indiscriminate denials of 
truths which are really found in the Bible, nor in 
any new discoveries of the faith which was once 
delivered to the saints, which this age is about to 
make. Drop the Gospel, if you will, in order to 
escape from the fear of future punishment. Science 
will take her own revenge on the world for its 
skepticism, and tell you with one common voice 
the absolute irreversibleness of law, and the cer- 
tainty of inevitable penal compensations. With 
her, one voice rings through all her chambers : 



22 THE VALLEY OF THE SLIABOW. 

" That thing that sinneth, it shall die." The same 
law holds in the realm of souls. Nature has need 
always for a future judgment. There is something 
more than poetry in the language of the Psalms, 
which says : " Let the sea roar and the fulness 
thereof ; the world and they that dwell therein. 
Let the floods clap their hands ; let the hills be 
joyful together before the Lord ; for he cometh to 
judge the earth : with righteousness shall he judge 
the world, and the people with equity.'' ^ Nature 
demands it ; and nature, too, claims a share in the 
interpretation of it. The place of punishment is 
not to be defined arbitrarily, by theologians or 
mere word-critics only. It must answer in some 
intelligible way to needs which are universally con- 
fessed. 

I am not about to tell you anything new on the 
subject of this place of final punishment. 

The word hell, as a place of final punishment y oc- 
curs for the first time in the Sermon on the Mount. 
It is not found in the Old Testament. I do not 
mean to say by this that the idea of future pun- 
ishment is not there. It is plain to my mind that 
the famous Bishop Warburton has demonstrated, 
in his famous work, called the Divine Legation of 
MoseSj that there was no religious system of an- 

^ Ps. xcviii. 7-9. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 



23 



cient times which amounted to anything, which 
did not base its power on the sanctions of future 
rewards and punishments, excepting alone that of 
Moses/'^ The poHty of Moses proceeded on the 
thought of God as being always present in it to 
make good his own laws. It was exceptional. On 
this fact he claims that it was of divine origin. 
Again the instinct of a future world as necessary 
to set right the discords of this life has been suffi- 
ciently exhibited by Bishop Butler in his famous 
work. The Analogy of Religion. In the Old Tes- 
tament we find these two ideas existing beneath 
the surface. The one, in the often-recurring pre- 
monition of a judgment to come ; the other, in the 
look of anticipation which belongs to the whole 
volume of the Old Testament. But the word hell^ 

* Bishop Warburton, for whose eccentricities or temper I do not 
choose to be held responsible, has laid down ** three very clear and 
simple propositions," which suffice my immediate purpose. 

1. That to inculcate the doctrine of a future state of rewards and 
punishments is necessary to the well-being of society. 

2. That all mankind, especially the most wise and learned na- 
tions of antiquity, have concurred in believing and teaching that 
this doctrine was of such use to society. 

3. That the doctrine of a future state of rewards and ptinishinents 
is not to be foujid in, nor did it make pai't of the Mosaic Dispensa- 
tion. 

On this last proposition he founds his argument, that '' the 
Jewish Religion and Society were supported by an extraordinary 
Providence. ^^ 



24 



THE VALLEY OF THE SILADOW, 



as a place of punishment, is not in the Hebrew 
Bible."^ Our translators have confused the thought 
by confusing the words as they have done. When, 
for instance, it says : " The wicked shall be turned 
into helly and all the nations that forget God,'' f 
it is the same word which David uses of himself, 
when he hopes that his own soul shall not be left 
in hell.:}: These same words are cited in the New 
Testament, as being true of the soul of Christ ; 
and as proving beyond dispute that the resurrec- 
tion was really anticipated in this preparatory 
manner in the Old Testament. In that book, the 
Hebrew word Sheol is equivalent to the word 
Hades of the Greeks, though with some differ- 
ences. It signifies merely a place of departed 
spirits, and is so used in the Creed of the Church 
Catholic to-day. The Hebrews, as all the ancients, 

■^ '^ In the canonical books of the Old Dispensation there is not a 
single genuine text, claiming to come from God, which teaches ex- 
plicitly any doctrine whatever of a life beyond the grave. That 
doctrine, as it existed among the Jews, was no part of their pure re- 
ligion, but was a part of their philosophy. It did not, as they held it, 
imply anything like our present idea of the immortality of the soul, 
reaping in the spiritual world what it has sowed in the physical. It 
simply declared the existence of human ghosts amidst unbroken 
gloom and stillness in the cavernous depths of the earth, without 
reward, without punishment^ without employment, scarcely with 
consciousness." — Alger, Doct. of Future Life, p. 151. 

f Ps. ix. 17. 

:|: Ps. xvi. 10. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 25 

thought vaguely of a vast and dark under-grave^ a 
cavern beneath the surface of the ground, into 
which all souls went at death. It was dark, sepul- 
chral, shadowy. They did not define its divisions 
till very late in their history. Indeed it is not 
quite in keeping with the Oriental imagination to 
require any such definitions. It was more the 
taste of the Greeks ^ to create them. They had 
mapped it off in their mythology and poetry, and 
had run the streams of Tartarus, Cocytus and 
Pyriphlegethon through its misty shades. The later 
Jews seem to have imitated them in this profane 
picturing. I shall claim in its place that this par- 
tial silence is a sacred aesthetic. The subject is 
still in half-shadow. Before we have done with 
the present excitement of the community on the 
subject, the evils of its unskillful handling will be 
likely to prove the same. 

The history of this word Gehenna^ which is used 
in the text, and which comes into the light for the 
first time in the mouth of Christ, and, of all other 
places, appears first in the solemn Sermon on the 
Mount, is very remarkable. On the southeast side 

* Originally Hades \Yas a demi-god, and is so invariably in 
Homer. The name was afterward transferred to his abode or 
kingdom, and became the equivalent of the lower world of all 
souls. This idea of Hades as a monstrous being crept into the 
Jewish thought. — See Smith's Diet. 
2 



26 THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

of the Temple of the Jews, the valley of Jehosha- 
phat sinks down rapidly, into the deep wady or 
ravine, which drains the whole water-shed of the 
city of Jerusalem. This ravine turns first to the 
south and then to the east, and finally ends in 
the sullen level of the Dead Sea. Just south of the 
Temple, it forms a deep gorge, and at some early 
date it took the name of its first owners. This 
name in Greek was, Ge-Ben-Hinjiom, or the land 
of the sons of Hinnom. It became shortened 
into Ge-Hinnom, and finally into Gehejzjta. It is 
Christ's word for hell. Its history was such, that 
I fancy the blood ran cold as the eloquent tongue 
of the Gallilean prophet first uttered it in connec- 
tion with the fate of sinners beyond the grave. 
There, in a watered valley, in the palmy days of 
the city, was located the king's garden or park. 
Solomon, the first of scientific botanists, who 
knew every plant " from the cedar-tree that is in 
Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth 
cut of the wall," indulged his tastes in beauti- 
fying the spot. There he sought to realize the 
dreams which beset us all, of an Eden, a "garden 
of the Lord," and there as of old he found the 
fatal temptation of his passions, and fell into 
grievous sins. He sacrificed in it to the idols of 
his heathen wives, and corrupted himself and 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 27 

them by the orgies which attended the foul wor- 
ship of all the surrounding nations. Later on in 
history, the valley became the seat of that most 
abominable of all obscene w^orships, that of the 
horrid idol Moloch. There Natural Religion, 
w^hich some so much admire, worked out its own 
oft-repeated story. There men and w^omen w^ho 
had outraged all the finer pieties of the Mosaic 
system, and fled from Shiloah, that **went softly," 
at last found themselves sacrificing their sons and 
daughters unto this horrible revenge of the guilty 
conscience. The innocent babes of these sinners 
against nature and the law of Moses, w^ere cast 
into the arms of a huge, brazen image which was 
heated to a furious heat, and were burned up. 
One touch of nature rises out of the terrible tale 
of the national corruption connected with the 
place. They sought to drown the screams of the 
children with the noise of drums, beat by burly 
priests, w^ho themselves deserved to have been 
sent on this same fiery path to eternity. So the 
place took the name of Tophet, or '' the place of 
drums." 

In due time came the reaction. Lies, thank 
God ! cannot live forever. The picus reformer 
Josiah put a stop to the accursed butchery, and 
to make the curse effectual, he fought one super- 



28 THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 

stition with another. He wisely made the spot 
so polluted, that no man ever dared afterward to 
attempt either to live in or to ask any respectable 
foreign god to enter it. He caused all the dead 
bodies which were found around the city to be 
cast into the valley, and emptied all the offal of 
the town into its gloomy, fiend-haunted depths. 
He did his work effectually. He killed out that 
superstition effectually and finally in that spot. 
But in time a new trouble arose. The strong, hot 
sainiel winds from scorching sands of the south, 
were found to bring up the stench and malaria of 
the field into the city, and to defile and poison 
the very courts of the Temple of the Lord. So 
they lit fires there, and in the time of Christ, 
these fires were almost continual. They were 
"never quenched,'' but burned on day and night. 
You have the lively picture of this fact, in a pas- 
sage of the Revelation of St. John, as he repre- 
sents the saints of the New Jerusalem, looking 
off from the porches of the city which is now the 
Church of Christ, and seeing the smoke of the 
torment of the wicked ascending up forever.^^ 
You have it again in the words of Christ, as he 
speaks of "the worm that never dies, and the fire 
that is not quenched." On the whole it is not 

*Rev. xix. 3 ; xiv. ii. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 29 

too much to say, that of all the types and sym- 
bols of that strange place and people, which have 
been invented by prophets, psalmists, and poets, 
there is no one to compete in clearness of repre- 
sentation Avith this name used of it by Christ. 
It had been lying there as a foul, horrible night- 
mare, as a part of that city life, its word un- 
spoken, till it came up to be heard once and never 
again forgotten, in the Sermon on the Mount. 

It is probable that the dreams of men and 
women, that night, after they heard this new use 
of the word, were scared with terrors, as this 
nightmare bestrode them and uttered its horrific 
sounds, of undying worms and quenchless flames, 
and all for the good of their chief city : all for the 
health of its inhabitants. Put out the fires ! The 
foul poison will creep up the sacred hill, and in- 
vade the very presence of the God of Israel. 
Stop the undying worm ! It was inserted into 
the very frame of nature, when the first fern grew 
in the mists and fogs of old eternities as a law, 
that the bad must always die and change into 
other forms, in order that the endless cycles of 
created life may go on, and the world be found 
** very good " by its Creator and his children. This 
one word Gehenna^ spoken simply — for you will 
notice that Jesus gives no special emphasis to it, 



30 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. 



as at all peculiar — but once spoken, has of itself 
modified the history of the world from the time 
of that one utterance. 

It is perfectly true that some have made too 
much of it, and that thousands miss its meaning. 
It is plain to my mind that some of the inferences 
which have been drawn from it by Christian 
priests and preachers are simply atrocious, if not 
wicked. That does not touch the matter at 
stake. It is all the more a frightful word for that 
quiet utterance. You cannot attribute it to some 
wild enthusiasm of the sinner David ; you cannot 
insinuate that it began to be in the unhallowed 
revengefulness of some suffering, half-sanctified 
prophet. It did not start up into notice in the rich 
imagery of the patriotic Isaiah, nor give a deeper 
shadow to the lamentations of mournful Jeremy. 
In all their denunciations of the Gentiles, their 
detestations of monstrous tyrants or idolaters, 
they had never thought of giving their feelings 
vent by such a word. It came first from the Son 
of Man, It came from him in the quietest and 
serenest of his teachings; in that one of them all, 
when he was engaged with passionless principles 
and universal truths ; in truths of which he says : 
'^ if ye do these things, ye build on the rock.'* 
Men cannot change much about it. It is like the 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW, 



31 



statue of the Moses of Michael Angelo, passion- 
less and awful. Its peculiarities are arguments of 
its truth. Once seen, and there is no need of any, 
or certainly of many words about it. Some ages 
may think to pile up imaginary shades of horror 
about it. Dante, when he sought to do it, in ac- 
cord with the mediaeval temper, w^as compelled 
to go outside of the Bible for all his blacker 
colors. Priests have gathered about it sulphur- 
ous fumes of far-fetched dogma, and crowded its 
supernatural terrors with impossible and incon- 
ceivable qualities till it stands in the sermons of 
some preachers to-day like a monstrous Kilauea,^ 
upon the crust of whose crater you stand and look 
down a thousand feet below into miles and miles 
of living lava-fires.f But to me that is all 
pure human weakness, offering, like Uzza of old, 

* Kilaiiea^ a volcano of Hawaii, of eight miles circumference 
of living fire. There is a spot in the melted lava which is in 
constant ebullition, which the natives called Hale-mau-mau, or 
*^ House of Everlasting Fire," and regarded as the residence of 
the goddess Pele. An eruption of this volcano surpasses all that 
Dante dreamed or Milton conjured — pouring out 15,400,000,000 
cubic feet of lava — and in 1840 ending its work forty miles from 
where it began it. 

f Hear one of the popi^J^r preachers on this theme, and fancy 
him standing on Kilauea : " When thou diest, thy soul will be 
tormented alone ; that will be a hell for it : but at the day of 
judgment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have 
twin-hells, thy soul sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused 



32 



THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW, 



to hold up the Ark of God when the oxen stum- 
bled. There is many a spot in the history of this 
dark vale which might be marked w^ith statues of 
Perrez-Uzza, where men have lost sight of God*s 
light in their presumption. Would you know 
what a Christian reader of Scripture believes, con- 
cerning future punishment from the word of God ? 
You have this word, Gehenna^ standing in the very 
center of the noblest of Christ's discourses — given 
to the world by him — not intrusted to any in- 
ferior servant. You may look off in imagination 
from the walls of the very temple which typifies 
the New Jerusalem, and see the dark wavy spiral 
of smoke that tells you of the holiest '^ law of selec- 
tion '' that science knows. Accept the fact, and 
theji do not go beyond it. Drop from it all addi- 
tions which later men have made, and consider 
whether it is safe or possible for any man to lose 
his fear of that Being — who out of Christ is a con- 
suming fire — when in Christ, he has given us 
the remarkable revelation. I shall reject many 
things which have been added to this thought of 
Gehenna by uninspired men, but I shall do it, be- 

with agony. In fire exactly like that we have on earth thy body 
will lie, asbestos-like, forever unconsumed, all thy veins roads 
for the feet of pain to travel on, eveiy nerve a string on which the 
devil shall forever play his diabolical tune of Hell's Unutterable 
Lament." — Spzci-geoji, Sermon on the Resurrection of the Dead. 



THE VALLEY OF THE SLIADOW. 



33 



lieving that no salutary force of fear, and no poli- 
cy of morals in presenting truth can equal in force 
and wisdom, the real facts concerning this place, 
as Christ, once for all, gave them to the Church. 

I stop here, with no inference of my own to 
offer you to-day, and with a single warning : this 
excitement on this question of the future abodes 
for the lost indicates an under-current of life here 
in these cities which is often seen coming to the 
surface. There is a drift in our metropolitan 
society, and the end is not yet. Before earth- 
quakes, springs often dry up or they are seen to 
rush up turbidly in strange spots ; it is the same 
in nations and in churches. Thus the French 
Revolution, and many another social outbreak 
has been heralded by a previous general amnesty 
and promises of a rose-colored millennium. Sodom 
was "like the garden of the Lord" twenty-four 
hours before the storm of God's wTath came. 
Similar signs now loom up, the same dangers beset 
us. What is God's truth in this matter will live on 
independent of our fancies. What is our disease 
here, and our exaggeration, and pragmatical im- 
pertinence which takes this oft-repeated diagnosis, 
it may be well for us to contemplate. Let us 
search the word of God for what it truly says, and 
learn and know from it whom, and what to fear. 



11. 

THE WORD GEHENNA.* 

St. Matthew, v. 22. — But whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall 
be in danger of hell-fire. 

T CALL your attention in the first place, to the 
-^ pecuHar manner in which this word comes 
to the surface of the scriptural record. It is not 
in the effort to impress a horrid crime, and create 
a sensation of its brutality or its intrinsic guil- 
tiness. If it had been, we might think of the 
speaker as unconsciously influenced by the natural 
excitement of a sacred indignation. It would be 
natural. If Jesus had been describing at the time 
some monster of iniquity, like Judas, or Annas, 
or Nero ; if he had been stirred by the anticipa- 
tion of scenes of blood and horror, say of such as 
afterward occurred in the Roman amphitheaters, 
and had given vent to the grief of his soul, in this 
word, we should expect it. The passion would 
explain it ; but the Master is at his quietest. He 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn, Feb- 
ruary 10, 1878. 

34 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 



35 



IS sitting on a sunny hill-top. He is surrounded 
with simple people. He is discoursing of the 
land of Beulah, and the still waters, where the 
Shepherd of Israel was to lead his flock. He 
is both as pastoral and as serene as he is ever 
described. He is too, just telling them of that 
wonder of the new system, which he was to in- 
troduce, the love — the brother-thought, which was 
to separate him and his Gospel from all other 
teachers and gospels to the end of time. Bless- 
ings, like pearls, are dropping from his lips. He is 
in the gentlest of possible moods. He is also in 
the spring-time, the hey-day of his work; no one 
has yet withstood him and rudely ruffled him ; 
no bigoted priest or low-browed scribe has yet 
cast his shadow across his path. He is about to 
tell the peasants around him of that Divine 
Charity, for which he has received the plaudits 
of even infidels and misbelievers, and this is the 
way he does it : ^' But I say unto you [in contrast 
to that old literal law written on the stone] that 
whosoever is angry with his brother without a 
cause, shall be in danger of the Judgment : and 
whosoever shall say to his brother, Raea, shall be 
in danger of the Council: but whosoever shall 
say. Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire. 
Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and 



36 THE WORD GEHENNA. 

there rememberest that thy brother hath aught 
against thee, leave thy gift before the altar, and 
go thy way: first be reconciled to thy brother, 
and then come and offer thy gift." I pass by 
just now the side questions which suggest them- 
selves in the use of this Oriental language, for 
that one thought which is to my purpose. Jesus 
is here exalting charity by the homeliest of appli- 
cations to its due place in contrast to formal re- 
ligion. God, as he tells us, is willing to wait for 
sacrifices rather than for fair conduct to a wronged 
fellow-man. Directly in the center of this first 
promulgation of the divinest charity that ever 
has fallen from the lips of man, he has entwined 
and entangled this revelation of the sinner's hell. 
Did he then foresee, that the temptation would 
always be* felt, to attack the theory of future 
punishment on the platform of his mercifulness? 
He has certainly so bound the two things up into 
one bundle, that no man can ever cut the knot 
that holds them together. He must either con- 
tradict Christ, or despise him, to get away from 
these words. 

The real question before this community just 
now is. Is God so mercifid that he will wipe out 
the idea of hell from his revelation ? What are we 
to do, ask eloquent preachers, with the myriads, 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 37 

who deserve in our estimation only some gentler 
sort of purgatory; who are open to some penalty, 
but whom we are unable to look upon as among 
the lost ? It is a humanitarian plea. If it were 
not for the manner in which the revelation of the 
punishments of the future are recorded, the objec- 
tion would possibly prevail with most men. But 
it is, in my judgment, im.possible to separate the 
idea, and change its relations much from what the 
Church has decided of them ages ago. She takes 
the words of Scripture, with all the lights which 
she can have, and offers to guide us by them, and 
leaves all such perplexities to the Judge of all 
the earth. There is nothing new in the flurry 
that has been sprung upon us. It is the same 
world-old trouble on the question of "' why evil 
exists at all.'* We have been drifting with the 
tide, and one and another have found suddenly, 
that the maxims which have been followed at 
hazard are unsound. If we look at the Church, 
we will find, that she has no need to change her 
thoughts, and we no occasion of a moment's worry 
as to the sounder decisions upon it. It is certain 
enough that the discussion which has been started 
will do apparent and temporary injury. It will 
help to disintegrate the popular systems of re- 
ligion ; and the first results of such disintegration 



38 THE WORD GEHENNA, 

must be injurious to individuals, just as a war 
disturbs a land and destroys multitudes of indi- 
vidual soldiers. In all men of the baser sort, who 
have been held in some order by their fears, the 
injury will be great and inconvenient. If you re- 
move the fears of such men, the danger of riot pos- 
sibly increases in them. They only know enough 
of the discussion to remember, that eminent Bible 
scholars have expressed some doubts as to the 
exact lines of thought in regard to this subject. 
They do not trouble themselves to know that 
there is the same substantial agreement on the 
main point of the sufficiency of the final punish- 
ment that there has always been. The questions 
which have been raised, I will examine at another 
time. I present at this time the main point only : 
— that hell, or a place of future punishment, is a 
fact of the gospels, and is so received by this 
Church. 

As I have said before, it comes to the surface, 
in this text, for the first time. The Rev. John 
Keble, poet and divine, has well said what has 
been often said before and since in prose : 

''The Fount of Love 
His servants sends to tell love's deeds, 
Himself reveals the sinner's hell/' 

If this is so, it manifests a dread, a silence, a pro- 



THE WORD GEHENNA. jg 

found solemnity in the subject, as it lies in the 
Bible, which has been miserably lost sight of. 
This is one of the bolts which has been stored 
away, in the secret arsenal of the Being who 
moved over the sacred page, to be revealed only 
when the plan of his redemption was at last 
fully displayed. Not one of the rewards and 
punishments of the Pentateuch, in terms, looks 
beyond this life. I say/;/ terms. The Israelites had 
their own thoughts of the instinctive and universal 
fears of another world, into which the immortal 
soul passed after death. They had that much by 
nature ; and there was no need to emphasize it 
in revelation. If men could banish the darker 
side of this thought of necessary punishment 
from the Church, it would come back again of 
itself. It is a disease of the human imagination, 
which the Gospel regulates and confines to limits. 
Long before Moses, the fierce priests of Egypt 
summoned even the dead bodies of kings into 
their court, and mimicked the trial which all men 
believed to take place, in the gloomy shades of the 
vast under-ground. Orcus, Rhadamanthus, and 
Pluto are instinctive creations of the imaginations 
of wicked men. If the good men of the world 
could destroy the doctrine of future punishment, 
the bad would become its apostles and howl its 



40 THE WORD GEHENNA, 

awfulness on the common ear. It is the part of 
the Great Physician to proclaim the fact of it, 
and then leave it balanced against his rich prom- 
ises of grace, so as to make his tenderness most 
apparent in it all. It is, as we would say, origi- 
nal with him, as it stands in the New Testament. 
It is Clu'isfs treatment of it, to which I call your 
attention, nozv. 

The word Gehenna or hell occurs twelve times 
in the New Testament. Once St. Peter, speaking 
of lost spirits, uses the word Tartarosas, or the 
bringing them down to Tartarus.^ This is put 
in the English Bible as helL But it is the Greek 
classic story alone which tells us what the word 
means. Does any Bible reader believe in the 
mythology of Homer? So that the word hell diS 
a place of punishment in the severe sense, is used 

* 2 Pet. ii. 4. This word " does not occur elsewhere in the New 
Testament, nor in the Septuagint, therefore the meaning must be 
sought for from other sources, from Homer, Hesiod, and Plato." — 
Bengel. " ^£ipai<^ ^oipov rapraiDGoda^ is an expression truly 
^schylean, in which rapr. is derived from the Heathen, and 
daipai^ coipov from the Jewish mythology: the Tartarus being a 
part of Hades in which criminals were supposed to be confined till tlie 
day of judgment. Now they are not represented as being in actual 
torments, but only adjudged Vo them, and in the meantime commit- 
ted to the security of chains of darkness, i, e., to places where 
darkness holds them as it were enchained." — D7'. Bloomjield. The 
word should not have been translated hell. It is of pagan origin 
and is to be construed as the poetry of mythology. 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 4 1 

but twelve times in the whole Bible. ^'Ah!" 
says some one, '^ that takes something from its 
authority/' Let us look at that point for a mo- 
ment. It is only necessary, for a sentence of 
death against a criminal to be signed once. No 
man expects . it to be placarded on the fences at 
every corner. If the fact is once clearly told, it 
is enough. That it is not hurled indiscriminately 
at every sin and every sinner, is another thing 
about it that is to be considered in its place. 

On one occasion St. James, speaking of an evil 
and malicious tongue, says metaphorically, ^' it sets 
on fire the course (or wheels margin) of nature, and 
it is set on fire of heir' (Gehenna). This seems to 
me one of the most perilous hyperboles in the 
Bible : but it is one, and puts the makebate and 
slanderer in the catalogue of devils, with a ven- 
geance. It is passionate exaggeration. 

Besides these tAvo instances of the use of the 
apostles, our Lord used the w^ord on four occa- 
sions : and 07tly he has used it. That is, of the 
twelve times that it is used, Christ is the only one 
in the Bible who uses it directly of the future 
state of the souls of men, after the day of judg- 
ment. So much then for the idea that it is 
foreign to his gentler nature, and a thing of 
previous barbarism. Two things then cannot be 



42 



THE WORD GEHENNA, 



hidden ; one, that this word — Gehenna — was Christ's 
word, and was avoided by the New Testament 
writers. They left it with him. The other is, that 
Christ has involved the thought in the center 
of his most merciful doctrines, so that you can- 
not tear it again out without destroying the force 
of the most precious ideas of the Gospel, Let 
us look at the several instances of this use of it, 
for that must be the sole test at last of the idea 
of Christ. 

He used the word on four occasions. He pre- 
sents it in connection with five great ideas. 

I. In the Sermon on the Mount, and there he 
uses it in uttering two thoughts. One of them is 
in the text. The thought here is, that if the two 
things at any time come into comparison, then the 
love of our fellow-man and regard for his rights are 
always paramount. You may leave yoar gift at 
the altar, till you get back, and God will condone 
the fault. But he will not forgive deadness to 
the law of the brotherhood. He who calls his 
brother, fool^ is in danger of Gehenna. 

H. Again, speaking of lust,^ he says : *' It is bet- 
ter to cut off a right hand or to pluck out a right 
eye than to go into hell," a sound body with a 
rotten heart. Who doubts it? 

* St. Matt. V. 29, 30. 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 



43 



III. Again,"^ he tells us a grand truth, and gives 
a very war-trumpet alarum, as he is seen shouting 
to his warriors all along the course of history: 
^' Fear not them who kill the body, but only Him 
who has power to cast both soul and body into 
hell/' It has been the very nerve-principle of the 
world's reformation. It has been the strength of 
martyrs all along. It has lifted the fear of God to 
its right place in the minds of all men, and shed a 
divine light on the history of the Church. 

IV. Again in St. Matthew, xviii. 9, and St. 
Mark, ix. 43, 45, and 47, he repeats himself, in 
comparing the lowly condition of his followers 
with the pride of worldly men : ^^ Woe unto the 
world because of offenses, for they must come ; 
but you, my disciples, never forget that it is better 
to suffer the loss of anything here below, though 
it be a hand, a foot, or an eye, rather than com- 
promise the conscience. It is better to enter into 
life blind, if such a thing could be imagined, or 
halting on one leg, than by a cowardly escape 
from painful duty here, to go into hell with all the 
limbs perfect.'' Now thus far, let me note that he 
is using the fact of final punishment as a kind 
father, to warn his own children. He is not speak- 
ing to those who are outside of his own family. 

^ St. Matt. X. 28, and St. Luke, xii. 5. 



44 THE WORD GEHEyNA. 

Thus far he is using the word indirectly, and not 
directly. He is taking it for granted, as some- 
thing which was known to his hearers. What was 
known to them was not our own modern ideas, 
but the valley of Hinnom, to the south of the 
Temple, as a metaphor for a valley somewhere near 
the spiritual temple which was to come. Thus far 
his use of the fact is altogether different from its 
common treatment now. 

V. But in the last instance of the word, its 
darker shade comes into view. He is speaking 
there to the hardened reprobates of earth, who 
were then represented by the unfortunate and 
guilty, but most religious Pharisees, and he de- 
nounces them in the severest manner, if possible 
to break through the crust of their self-delusions.^ 
^^ Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! 
for ye compass sea and land to make one prose- 
lyte ; and when he is made, ye make him twofold 
more the child of hell than yourselves ! Ye ser- 
pents ! ye generation of vipers ! how can ye escape 
the damnation of hell? '' The word daiitnation has 
gathered a stain from our present coarser habits 
of speech, which it had not when it was thus trans- 
lated by Tyndale. At all events, the original 

* St. Matt, xxiii. 15 and 33. 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 45 

means simply co7idemiiationJ' It is not the inten- 
tion of the Saviour to pile terror on two words, 
where one is sufficient. In the first of these last 
two sentences, the being a twofold child of hell \'s> 
of course an hyperbole, and must be taken meta- 
phorically and not directly. Taken as prose, it 
meant directly that the proselytes who were labo- 
riously made by the Pharisees, had a double right 
to be considered reprobates — one by denying their 
original natural rehgion, or by the consequences of 
such religions ; the other, by becoming as hard and 
hypocritical as their teachers. In the last sentence 
the words are an impassioned question, and leave 
something to a charitable doubt as to the answer. 
Let me interpose here, that I am not forgetting 
that I am only looking at a word, and that there 
are other words that come into the question, such 
as *' the wrath of God," " everlasting fire," *^ the 
second death," ^' the bottomless pit," ^' the eter- 
. nal punishment," and others ; and that these may 
modify our conclusions. Let it be granted, for 
the present. We cannot, however, get at any pro- 
per conclusion by rambling off into side questions. 



■^ Kpz()Z? — ^judgment. " The verb ' to damn * and its cognates 
does not once occur in the Old Testament. No \yord conveying 
any such meaning occurs in the Greek of the New Testament." — 
Dr. Fay-ray's Eternal Hope, p. xxix. 



46 THE WORD GEHENNA. 

Our method in this discussion, as in all things, 
must be to leave such things to take care of them- 
selves, till we find some sure ground on which to 
stand. I am conscious of differing very painfully 
from many sectarian teachers, who suppose them- 
selves to be in the inner shrine of the secrets of 
the Scriptures as to Gospel doctrines. I therefore 
deliberately take my stand on the above words of 
the Master himself, and try to square all other 
answers to them, and not them to others. I take 
his words in these two discourses in the strongest 
meaning which they can bear by the rules of 
honest language, that I may the more carefully 
exclude from them the inferences of later ages. 
I hold that he first of all revealed the meaning 
which is found in the word Gehenna^ and that he 
closed the revelation of it. All else is in my judg- 
ment the inference, of inspired or uninspired men, 
•from his language. 

The point from which the present drift of the. 
Church began, is, after all, far inside of and behind 
this one question, on the methods of interpretation 
of the Scriptures. This discussion has its roots in 
deeper issues of the questions of inspiration, and 
will be at last decided by most men, on the results 
of those other perplexities. 

First, then, Christ used that word, taken from 



THE WORD GEHENNA. 47 

the most foul and horrid thing around Jerusalem, 
the Valley of Hinnom^ where lust and passion, and 
sensuality and murder, had outraged all natural 
limits ; where again nature had scourged the vic- 
tims of lust to dark and fatal deeds of blood ; 
where shrieking mothers and brutal priests had 
made the orgies of a filthy idolatry too terrific to 
be dwelt on : where that happened which happens 
in all God's world, and men accept it as the tri- 
bute to the fiat that he made it '' very good," and 
that the lawless, and the base, and corrupt do well 
to die ; that the worm, in his way, is an angel of 
God, and not of the devil ; that he gnaws at cor- 
ruption, and helps to remove it out of sight, and 
send it on its course again to try once more a 
newer life in other forms ; and that the pure fire 
is noble and blest that it eats it up and removes 
the evil of its dying, and keeps the atmosphere 
clear for those who love God : I say that he takes 
that word, Gehe7ina^ and casts it into his system of 
divinest thought, and warns us by it of the horrors 
of lawlessness, and baseness, and corruption. I 
will go just as far as he did ; and so help me God, 
I will go no step farther. What is clear, I accept 
dogmatically as clear. What is cast into gentler 
half-shadows, and is left unsaid — left to the in- 
stinctive fears of mankind, I will accept as shadowy 



48 THE WORD GEHENNA. 

and as better not defined. Take away all human 
inferences and all system-scaffolding, and the rest 
is God's truth. Let us learn to become satisfied 
with only that. It is clear enough, that Christ 
has told us of a dark gorge outside the city walls, 
where Judas bought a place of his own with blood- 
money, that burnt his hands, and where he lies in 
^^his own place,'' a wretched suicide; where in the 
tireless work of good that rules in all things, the 
worm never dies, while the corruption is there to 
be removed ; where the fires are never quenched 
while empoisoning filthiness remains to be burned 
up, but continue always working to remove out 
of being whatever can offend. Is it real fire ? Is 
it eternal? Is it the dual theme of every Gospel 
sermon ? I will speak on these questions in their 
places. 

I leave with you another fact about this word. 
How seldom is it spoken of. How singular was 
the delicacy of St. Peter, and St. Paul, and the 
rest of the Scripture writers, that they would not 
adopt it ; that one of them went to pagan mytho- 
logy for his word when he needed it, rather than 
touch this one which Christ had used. Was it 
something which they could not understand, the 
law of nature, that the worm and the fire are, in 
their way, good things ? That as they wrought for 



THE WORD GEHENNA. ^g 

blessing in the Jew-city, so, somehow, they were to 
work always for the weal of the spiritual city? 
Or was there a grand delicacy in them, which we 
have lost sight of ? that the word belonged to the 
Son of God alone? that only he who should in 
pity judge mankind could really comprehend the 
weight of it in his own heart? How shadowy it 
is kept. It is the shadow which follows the softest 
light ; the minor key of the Song of the Lamb — 
minor, but sweet still. Imagine Jesus saying to 
some poor sinner, " Love me, or you must go to 
hell. Be converted, or burn forever and ever.*' 
^^True enough!" do you say? Ay! a7td as trite 
that he never did it. His servants do it for him, 
and men are now groping for escape from their 
methods. Offenses must come ! Dark woes throng 
the ways of wicked men ! The fears and furies, 
the Erinnyes and Nemesis, are as instinctive to 
men as their loves and hopes. Christ has infused 
them into the Gospel, emphatically enough to re- 
fute all attempts to doubt or deny them. But he 
has done so with a loving skill, which uses them 
to inspire in us the love which casteth out fear. 
What may be — who can tell to the letter ? What 
is taught by Christ, is not to call a brother fool^ 
but to be pure, and to be true to conscience and 
to God, here and now. 
3 



III. 

THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE.* 

St. Mark, ix. 43, 44.— And if thine hand offend thee, cut it off ; it 
is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands 
to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched ; where 
their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. 

A T the little village of Tagaste, in Numidia, 
-^ -^ now called Algeria, on November 13, A. D. 354, 
was born a boy, who was destined to exercise as 
great an influence on the history of the religious 
thought of the world as ever any man has done. 
The empires of conquerors and statesmen have 
perished and the evidences of their progress for a 
time have vanished from the face of the earth. 
But the empire of religious thought has to-day no 
name that can challenge equality of influence with 
that oi Aurelius Atigustmus. We know of him gen- 
erally by the name which cities have been proud to 
bear, as St, A iigiistine. His father was a Pagan, and 
his mother a Christian— the boy was both, in turn, 
and by his experience both in sin and in virtue 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Feb. 17, 1S78. 

50 



THE WORK OF ST, AUGUSTINE, 



51 



interpreted to his age the real conquest, in which 
the battle between the two systems is destined to 
end. An eloquent and learned scholar, he yielded 
to the pathetic yearnings of the mother-heart in 
him, and the persuasive eloquence of St. Ambrose, 
Bishop of Milan, and after a sharp and bitter strug- 
gle with himself, he became a new man in Christ 
Jesus, was baptized at thirty-three years of age, 
and rose to be the greatest power known to the 
Church of God, in any age since the Ascension of 
the Master. He died at seventy-six years of age, 
Bishop of Hippo, in Africa, and left to the world 
an immortal legacy, in his name and holy char- 
acter, for his victory over the evils of life ; and in 
his works of religious dogma and morals. He is 
the greatest doctor recognized as of authority by 
all Christendom. Honored in the Eastern Church, 
he has been the standard authority of the Latin 
Christianity, through all its history, and the Re- 
formers of the sixteenth century looked to him 
as the last Court of Appeal, next to the Bible, in 
all doubtful questions in theology, interpretation, 
or morals. His age was a dark one. The visions 
of the Apocalypse were coming to pass. The old 
foundations of the Roman Empire were being 
destroyed and everything was rushing down to 
chaos, under the northern flood of barbarism, 



52 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTI.VE. 



then setting in finally, along the whole Mediterra- 
nean coast. Horrible cruelties and miseries at- 
tended the sack of the Imperial City, and the con- 
querors of it rise before the mind of the student 
of history, as terrible avengers of God, sweeping 
off the remains of a corrupt civilization and de- 
stroying the very grass where the feet of their 
horses fell. Babylon the Great had fallen ! had 
fallen ! — and in one hour so great riches had come 
to nought. That older, profane civilization, begun 
far back on the banks of the Mesopotamian rivers, 
and magnificent in its mighty course of conquest, 
pride, and cruelty, had met its fate, as foreseen by 
the Seer of lonely Patmos."^ 

It was an age of gloom and general despair, of 
untold horrors and savage cruelties, worse than 
the worst days of the former Pagan persecutions. 
The Church had, until this period, retained much 
of her original simplicity, and her childlike faith. 
The Christians were not a learned class, and — 
except in very few instances — not a critical peo- 
ple. Doctrinal exactness was mostly unknown, 
and despite the fierce discussions which arose, 
their history seems mostly a battle of giants seen 
through a mist. Men had been hopeful mostly. 
They had looked vaguely for a millennium as 

* Revelation, xviii. 



THE WORK OF ST, AUGUSTIXE, 53 

somehow coming to explain the evils of Hfe to 
them, but now there " was no voice, no sound, nor 
any one to answer," while taunting cries came on 
the air, through the blood and darkness of smoke, 
to ask them, '' Where is now thy God ? '* The 
old reasonings and explanations of Christianity 
now failed to comfort the believers or to attract 
the Pagans. Jerusalem had hardly risen from its 
ruins ; and now the Imperial City of Rome was 
made to drink the wine-cup of the Wrath of God. 
In the early autumn of A. D. 410, eleven hun- 
dred and sixty-three years after its foundation, 
Rome was sacked by the Goths under Alaric. It 
was the period to which prophecy had been point- 
ed from the beginning. It was the flood which 
seemed to sweep away the foundations of the old 
civilization. Thick darkness rested not only on 
the nations, but on the Church as well. For she 
found that her battle with the world now de- 
manded an entire change of weapons and a new 
system of tactics. In other words, faith must give 
room to philosophy. A new City of God must be 
found to take the place of the older landmarks of 
the past. The man to build it was at hand. Then 
the clear voice of the greatest thinker on sacred 
things that has ever lived, was heard. Of talents 
that were unquestioned, of sufficient experience in 



54 



THE WORK OF ST, AUGUSTINE. 



the ways of sin, and so able to console those who 
were like him ; of ardent imagination and most 
pious courage in destroying the remains of sin in 
his own members, and so skilled to build the City 
of God on the foundations of that earthly City of 
Rome, that was ruined by the northern barba- 
rians, he rises before us as the proper ^ Lnperator 
or Leader of that militant City of the Saints. I 
say all this truth of him freely, because I intend 
just now to go counter to his opinion on the subject 
which the text reveals : f the nature of Gehemta, 
or the doctrine of future punishment. 

He gave to the subjects of Christian belief logi- 
cal consistency, and with it the gloomy coloring 

* ** He possessed a strong, capacious, argumentative miitd ; he 
boldly sounded the dark abyss of grace, predestination, free-will, 
and original sin ; and the rigid system of Christianity which he 
framed or restored, has been entertained with public applause and 
secret reluctance by the Latin Cliurch." — Gibbon, ch. xxxiii. , A. D. 
430, p. 550. 

f " Good men may be — they often have been — utterly mistaken 
in their most cherished theology, and in their most impassioned 
convictions, but good men never live in vain, because their spiri- 
tual achievements are more sacred than their doctrines, and their 
lives moi-e valuable than their beliefs. And systems, too, founded 
on erroneous prejudices, may grow corrupt and injurious, 
' And God fulfill himself in many ways. 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,' 
but if they be based on sincerity, they cannot fail to leave to man- 
kind a legacy of truth and wisdom." — Fred. W. FarraVy D.D.y 
F.R.S., in St. James's Lectures, lee. i., p. 14. 



THE WORK OF ST, AUGUSTINE. 



55 



of his sad age. I do not see how he could help 
it. I do not blame him for it. But I vow no 
sort of obedience to his system of divinity. I 
regard the most of it as a perversion. Just as I 
could allow the greatness of Hippocrates and re- 
fuse to take medicines on his theory, so I reve- 
rence Augustine, and claim to differ from his 
decisions in favor of a higher Master. I part 
from him altogether in his idea of God ; I propose 
now to show the coloring which he, most of all 
before and in his age, gave to the subject of eter- 
nal punishment. 

For a long time, the divinity of the Church oh 
many subjects had been very simple, not to say 
confused. The words of Scripture were accepted 
very much as children take them. Now, both 
because this simplicity was bound to cease, in the 
nature of things, and because the wonderful logic 
of the old Greek Aristotle was again coming into 
favor in the Pagan world, the analytical mind of 
this man became the alembic into which the old 
faith of the child-day of the Church was thrown 
and melted, and came out a mixture in which 
much is pure gold and much is dross. Chris- 
tianity till then had been mostly regarded as 
a life; henceforth it was to be a philosophy, I hold 
that the St. Paul before him, and the St. Paul 



56 THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 

afterward, are two men. Till his day, future 
punishment had been left very much in the half- 
shadow of the Scripture. If men asked questions 
here and there about its details, their replies seem 
to have varied, according to their tempers and cir- 
cumstances. They were willing not to know. A 
dreaminess or mist prevailed over the tendency 
to definitions. The Fathers of the early Church 
can hardly be cited for any established systematic 
views on this subject. Irenaeus assigned different 
habitations to the blessed,^ and believed that 
'' those who, in this brief temporal life, have shown 
themselves ungrateful to Him who bestowed it, 
shall not justly receive from Him length of days 
forever and ever." Every such man, " inasmuch 
as he is created, and has not recognized Him who 
bestowed [the gift upon him], deprives himself of 
continuance forever and ever." — See book ii., ch. 
xxxiv. 

Clement of Alexandria had an idea of differing 
degrees of blessedness, wherein the saints '^ enter 
more nearly into the state of impassible identity, 
so as no longer to have science and possess knowl- 
edge, hct to be sciejice and knowledge T — Stromataj 
book iv., ch. vi. 

* These were Heaven, the Garden, and the City, among which 
the saints were ta be distributed hereafter. — See book v., ch. xxxv. 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 57 

It was easy for them to pass to the idea of further 
developments of conditions, for good or bad, after 
this Hfe. Justin Martyr held that the '' souls of the 
good never die ; but others are punished so long 
as God wills them to exist and to be punished." 
— Dial, with Trypho, ch. v. 

Origen, as he held evil to be rather the nega- 
tion of good than something existing of itself, so 
he taught a limit to future punishment and a final 
restoration of all things. The bodies of the lost 
he held to be all black, by w^hich he seems to have 
meant rather the ignoring of all definition con- 
cerning them. The outer darkness was a state of 
complete ignorance. He thought the design of 
all punishments to be to heal or to correct, and 
thus finally to restore the sinner to the favor of 
God. '^ The Oriental idea of a purifying fire also 
occurs during this period, in the writings of Cle- 
ment of Alexandria and Origen. This purifying 
fire, however, is not thought to perform its work 
in the intermediate state, but is either taken in a 
comprehensive sense, or supposed to stand in some 
connection or other with the general conflagra- 
tion of the v/orld."^ 

This was largely changed from and after the 

^ See Hagenbach, vol. i., pp. 217 and 219. 

3* 



58 THE WORK OF ST, AUGUSTINE, 

age of Augustine. It is to be said in his favor, 
that he was less severe in his logic, in this direc- 
tion, than some of his opponents. But he left 
nothing in the future fates to be imagined. He 
aimed to give the world the City of God which 
St. John had seen coming down as a bride out of 
heaven. For much that he accomplished we thank 
him. He certainly left us the City of Dogma , with 
rocky walls and iron gates and gloomy prisons in 
it, where racks and thumbscrews, chains and mar- 
tyr-fires, were native to the place.^ 

He defined with unhesitating philosophy all the 
limits and circumstances of the blessed and of 
the lost. He caught up the slightest allusions 
to the matter that lay unnoticed in stray texts, 
rites, symbols, or circumstances in either Testa- 
ment. He boldly met all the difficulties which 
daunted others and resolutely put down all tend- 
encies to merciful alleviation of the sufferings of 
the enemies of Christ. Where breaks occurred 
in the inspired expressions of the subject, he 
magnificently spanned them over with bridges of 
splendid logic,- and strengthened his work with 

* Mosheim holds Augustine largely responsible for the vital 
creed of Dogmatism, that "errors in religion are to be visited with 
penalties and punishments," and thinks him spotted with the lep- 
rosy that " to deceive and lie is a virtue when religion can be pro- 
moted by it." — Book ii., cent, iv., pt. ii., ch. iii., § i6. 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 



59 



the buttresses of a faultless rhetoric. He did in 
logic what Dante did in poetry, to map off and 
make real, to a gross race and for many dark ages 
after him, the gloomy regions of Gehenna as he 
saw it. For example, because Christ repeats three 
times, that a man should choose the loss of a 
member here on earth as preferable to the punish- 
ment of God hereafter, he sees in it only the terrors 
of the triple repetition and the vehemence of the 
Lord. He makes Paul's phrase, " Who is offended 
and I burn not ? '' an argument to prove that fire 
can burn the soul of a man as well as the body. 
He strengthens the idea of the undying worm by 
Ecclesiasticus : ^' As the moth consumes the gar- 
ment, and the worm the wood, so does grief con- 
sume the heart of man.'' He scouts the notion 
that either body or soul shall escape infinite 
agonies, and finds it easier to understand that the 
soul will do so rather than the flesh, but leaves a 
choice for the weak, either '' to assign the fire to the 
body and the worm to the soul " — the one really, 
the other figuratively — or to assign both really to 
the body. He is ready with facts of physical life, 
or what his age called science. He says, '^ For I 
have already sufficiently made out that animals 
can live in the fire, in burning without being con- 
sumed, in pain without dying, by a miracle of the 



6o THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 

most Omnipotent Creator, to whom no one can 
deny that this is possible, if he be not ignorant, 
by whom has been made all that is wonderful/* 
He shows a touch of human feeling, when he 
allows that ^^ the doubt on the question of ma- 
terial fire will remain till the time when the 
saints shall know the nature of those punish- 
ments Avithout the help of experience." He 
shows to the satisfaction of his age of sorrow and 
gloom, how fire could be material and yet burn 
souls and the immaterial spirits of devils. He jus- 
tifies the Creator for making punishments eternal 
as balanced against acts which are temporal, and 
falls back on his dogma of Adam's sin as having 
been infinite, and necessarily transmissible to every 
one of his descendants. This dual refraction of 
conscience, this looking at all things through a 
double medium, wherein all acts of transgression, 
when lacking intelligent explanation, in the light 
of common day, are made to teem with tremen- 
dous horrors, in the light of Adam's sin, is his 
most exquisite and fatal device. In this, multitudes 
of gloomy divines have followed him. '' I know,'' 
says a young girl to her Calvinistic father, ^' that I 
am a sinner, restless and unhappy ; but I do not 
feel that I am the worst person in the world." 
'' Ah ! " says the other, ^- the first trustworthy sign 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 6l 

of God's grace in your heart is, that you feel the 
awful inheritance of Adam's sin as yours ; that you 
are infinitely and forever guilty of the whole of it ; 
that you feel that you are a hell-deserving sinner, 
and that hell must be infinite and eternal to meet 
your deserts." I could weary you with quotations 
from Calvin of the old world, and from Jonathan 
Edwards and men of that ilk in this country, which 
demand of the consciousness of every true Chris- 
tian, an imperative need of hell as the only native 
and divine balance against the sin of Adam. It 
was most of all this terrific dogma which took the 
whole subject out of its natural place and brought 
its fiery use into dogmatic appliance to the per- 
sonal conscience, that marked the labors of this 
great man, but in this thing of iron-bound dogma- 
tism,"^ a most mistaken one. One word more of 

* If the following passage is orthodoxy, I rejoice in being an 
heretic. If this is the God whom men are worshiping, we need 
another revelation. " But eternal punishment seems hard and un- 
just to human perceptions, because in the weakness of our mortal 
condition there is wanting that highest and purest wisdom by which 
it can be perceived how great a wickedness was committed in that 
first transgression. The more enjoyment man found in God, the 
greater was his wickedness in abandoning him ; and he who de- 
stroyed in himself a good wdiich might have been eternal, became 
worthy of eternal evil. Hence the whole mass of the race is con- 
demned ; for he who at first gave entrance to sin has been punished 
with all his posterity who were in him as in a root, so that no one 
is exempt from this just and due punishment, unless delivered by 



62 THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE. 

this ancient writer. Though a thorough ascetic, he 
did not delight to go out of his way, to increase 
the horrors of this subject, when he could properly 
help it. He did not fear to adopt any conse- 
quences of his arbitrary and mistaken logic ; but 
he stopped there. Again he had the alleviation, 
which we lack, of a subordinate dogma concerning 
Purgatory, by which all his baptized friends and 
neighbors were saved from our peculiar difficul- 
ties. 

In his age again, preaching did not lack dramatic 
interest, from the ease and indifference of a pros- 
perous people. His hearers were tremendously in 
earnest, for or against him. 

His ideas were balanced against a church and 
softened by a system of divinity, that opened the 



mercy and undeserved grace ; and the human race is so apportioned 
that in some is displayed the efficacy of grace, in the rest, the effi- 
cacy of just retribution. For both could not be displayed in all ; 
for if all had remained under the punishment of just condemnation, 
there would have been seen in no one the mercy of redeeming 
grace. And, on the other hand, if all had been transferred from 
darkness to light, the severity of retribution would have been man- 
ifested in none. But many more are left under punishment than 
were delivered from it, in order that it may be thus shown what 
was due to all. And had it been inflicted on all, no one could 
justly have found fault with the justice of Him who taketh vengeance; 
whereas, in the deliverance of so many from that just award, there 
is cause to render the most cordial thanks to the gratuitous bounty 
of Him who delivers." — City of God, bk. xxi., ch. xii. 



THE WORK OF ST, A UGUSTINE, 63 

way of escape freely to all men. Baptism was 
considered almost a sure refuge from the eternal 
fires, which he blew into flame. The majority of 
his readers sought refuge for themselves in ^^ the 
city of God/' as he sketched it, with gates standing 
ever wide open to receive them. There it was 
easy for them to look off, and see the smoke of 
this fiery pit ascending ever for the destruction of 
heretics and pagans. But with those gates shut, 
as they are now practically save to a metaphysical 
and difficult entrance, the same subject is truly an 
horribile decretum. It is this new combination 
which is at the bottom of our present excitement 
on this theme. 

I have spoken of a consciousness on my part of 
differing from many of the popular opinions on 
this subject, which are now common, and which 
are so often repeated, that it seems almost like an 
act of impiety to doubt them. Still, I pretend not 
to go beyond the language of the Bible, when it 
is fairly understood, and in the vexed questions 
of philosophy versus faith, I am willing to accept 
any charge of inconsistency, as to philosophy, in 
favor of faith in the great spiritual ideas of Christ. 

It does not disturb me at all to be ignorant 
of many things, or to believe with St. Jerome, 
that the beginning of wisdom is to know where to 



64 THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 

be ignorant. There are many subjects of theol- 
ogy, which I hold, so to say, by believing the two 
ends of them, which I cannot doubt, though I can- 
not see through the dark abysses that intervene. 
For example, it is almost always interpreted, 
nowadays, that the fire which is not quenched 
signifies, by some secret force of the words, that 
the parties who are in it burn forever. Without 
now expressing opinions as to the permanence 
or otherwise of the fire, or of that for which it is 
made to stand, save that I suppose it amply suffi- 
cient for all practical purposes of present con- 
science, I suggest only, that the idea of un- 
quenchableness in the fire does not mean that the 
persons condemned to it are always burning in it. 
This horrible notion is not necessarily in either 
the word Gehenna^ or in the teachings of Christ 
concerning it. It certainly is not properly found 
in the story of Dives, which is an allegory, or 
fable, or a parable, as much as the Pilgrim s Pro- 
gress is. Dives then was in the grave and had no 
tongue, and really needed none, save in the holy 
fancy of Christ, who pointed the moral of the tale 
with his opinion, that a man who will not repent 
with Moses and the prophets in his hand, will not 
repent at the horrors of a spirit from the ghastly 
world of shades. The idea of making the sufferers 



THE WORK OF ST. A UG US TINE. 65 

of asbestos was first patristic and now is secta- 
rian. If I should hear a man refer to a foul field 
in the vicinage here, which had worms that never 
die, but feed on the putrefying bodies of animals 
always, I should of course believe, that his inten- 
tion was, to express the sufficiency of the race of 
worms to accomplish the ends of removing offen- 
sive material ; that they would always be there in 
numbers to remove the filth and offal of the city. 
They were so in the valley of Gehenna. This 
makes a full and complete meaning to the lan- 
guage of our Lord. It was his intention, as I 
read it, to assure the sinners of his time of the 
ever-continuing sufficiency of the means of puni- 
tive justice, in the city of the saints, w^hich is his 
Church. And probably, inasmuch as this idea of 
the present school did not make any headway for 
some scores of decades after Christ, it was the 
meaning which at first generally prevailed. The 
other thought came slowly to the surface, for 
many reasons. The science of those ages allowed 
men to believe in salamanders, or beasts, which as 
Augustine supposed endured life in the midst of 
agonies of burning.^ The pagan poetry of the 

* A false science has had its dire influence in this subject. 
" The philosophers," said Jerome, *'are familiar as well as we with 
the distinction between a common and a secret Jirc. Thus that 



66 THE WORK OF ST. A UG US TINE. 

classics lent its help. In a later age Dante inter- 
preted to Italian debauchees what Virgil and the 
other poets had taught the wicked men of his 
day ; things that now in our age come up mostly, 
to scare the wretches who find their guilty plea- 
sures ending in the horrors of delirium tremens, or 
of the furies of the mad-house. 

Guilt shapes the terror : deep within 
The human heart the secret lies 
Of all the hideous deities ; 

And painted on a ground of sin 
The fabled gods of torment rise. 

Chaos and fiery Phlegethon, Dis the gloomy, 
and dark Cocytus, cares and horrible conceits, 
men pursued by fate, demons and furies with 
snaky locks, Gorgons and harpies and chimaeras 
dire, things which you can realize now in the 
college hospital and at Bloomingdale, came one 

which is in common use is far different from that which we see in 
divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven, 
or bursting up out of the earth through mountain-tops ; for it does 
not consume vvhat it scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the 
mountains continue ever burning, and a person struck by lightning 
is even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof 
this of the fire eternal ! A notable example of the endless judg- 
ment which still supplies punishment with fuel. The mountains 
burn and last. How will it be with the wicked and the enemies 
of God ? " — Apol.^ ch. xlix. The science not having this " secret 
fire " of fact has vanished — what of the other ? 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTIXE. 6/ 

by one as time went on to take their seats in 
the valley of Gehenna. Talk of Christ's putting 
them there ! I say again, that if the Church 
should as a body deny their existence, they 
would gather there again of themselves. They 
are tJie Disease of Hicmajtity, Christians in this 
thing should remember that they are not the art- 
ists, to whom it is committed to increase the hor- 
rors of despair ; that their work is over, as soon as 
they have proclaimed their divine message, and 
that they are peculiarly the inheritors of a bless- 
ing and not of a curse. 

Again, in old times the superstitious beliefs of 
ignorant races lent an irresistible influence in this 
direction. Volcanoes, according to the faith of 
many generations later, were the penal abodes of 
monstrous giants, who made the regions round 
them terrible with their bowlings under their 
punishments. It was therefore natural, that ^^ the 
misinterpretation of the words of Christ should 
creep in unnoticed, that the undyingness of the 
worm should be transferred to the body of the 
subject who suffered, and that the unquenched 
fire should signify the eternity of the punishment, 
rather than its finality and sufficiency. 

Again, it is common always to bolster up one 
text with another, taken from other Scriptures 



68 THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 

somewhat at random. Thus it may occur to some 
that Isaiah asks,"^ *^ Who among us shall dwell 
with everlasting bicrnings ? " as if that somehow 
settled the doubt. They do not notice that the 
prophet answers his own question, thus : ^^ He 
that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly ; '' 
in other words, as Milton has it : *' The mind is its 
own place, and of itself can make a hell of heaven, 
a heaven of hell." 

Again, the book of Revelation is made to do ser- 
vice in this direction. It is the book least under- 
stood of any in the Bible. As I read it, the 
Redeemed there appeared to the Apostle St. 
John as looking off the Avails of the Holy City, or 
the Church, iiow^ and seeing, just as the Jew of 
old contemplated it from the temple porches, the 
smoke of the valley to the south, always rising to 
tell that the city should be free from injury, that 
the 'Worm in its creeping way and the fire in its 
sharp way, were always ministers of good and ser- 
vants of God. 

The text then tells us, in my reading of it, of , 
one fact, that the final punishment is sufficient. 
The motive power of Christian purity is now in 
that tremendous balance — of which death is the 
emblem — around which God has gathered the 

^ Ch. xxxiii. 14. 



THE WORK OF ST. AUGUSTINE, 69 

strong language which inasmuch as it passes into 
the contingencies of a world unknown is always 
awful by its own nature. It is the' balance of a 
short pain or a trifling loss here on earth — and 
what there ? Beyond that I care not to go. Do 
you ask, is it eternal? The question is impor- 
tant, and deserves consideration by itself. I think, 
that we shall find that Christ, and the Bible also, 
has answered this, in his own way. 



IV. 
ETERNAL—ITS USES.* 

St. Matthew, xxv. 46. — And these shall go away into everlast- 
ing punishment : but the righteous into life eternal. 

Eli HoXadiv aiovior — eii qo?/v aioviov, 

IN the original Greek, there is only one word 
used for both sides of this final contrast of hu- 
man life. The word is aioviov. If it means ever- 
lasting or eternal, it is the same in both. If there 
is a limit to one, there is, so far as this word goes, 
a limit to the other. We may read the text : 
'^ These shall go away into everlasting or eternal 
punishment, and the righteous into everlasting or 
eternal life.'' So far as the mere word establishes 
an identity of meanings, it is complete. I confine 
my remarks just now within that one considera- 
tion. 

These are the last words of the public teachings 
of Christ, which St. Matthew saw fit to record. 
He began his public teachings with ^^ Blessed are 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Brooklyn, Feb. 17, 

1878. 

70 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 7 1 

the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven." He concluded it with the assurance of 
their possession of '' Hfe eternal." 

The point of interest here is in the word eter- 
7iaL Every person takes it for granted that he 
has the exact meaning of the word in his mind, 
and despite all the difficulties which meet him, 
never stops to inquire whether in plunging off 
into the most metaphysical notion which enters 
into things of morals, he has the true meaning of 
the word which he is using at every turn. What 
is eternal? The objector will hastily answer: 
*^ Why, it is that which has absolutely no begin- 
ning nor end. Go back into the illimitable past 
and there is no conceivable point in the ideas of 
its unnumbered ages where you may get any 
nearer to a beginning of it, than you were when 
you started. Or fly on the wings of the swiftest 
thought, into the endless, unmeasurable future, 
and after ten million worlds have risen and ex- 
isted for as long a period as Darwin must assign 
to this present orb, and have waned and perished, 
you will not have moved a second toward the 
end." Now, that idea is philosophical. I am 
about to affirm : 

I. That it is a necessary idea. The mind of man 
in its very constitution requires it. 



72 . 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 



II. That it is an utterly impossible idea, either to 
express or reason on with any definiteness. And, 

III. That the scriptural use of the word is pecu- 
Har, and that the metaphysical sense of eternity 
is not found in it, except where it is possibly by 
implication, ascribed to the one God, who by the 
prophet is said to "' inhabit eternity,'' and by the 
apostle is claimed to be the only Ofte '' who hath 
immortality.''' 

The end of such a process of thought, is : 

I. That the Scriptures do not raise those per- 
plexed questions about the word which are in the 
minds of all who leave the clear light of the circle 
which is covered by the rays of the sun of right- 
eousness : and, 

II. That eternal life and eternal death, or pun- 
ishment are relative terms. 

I. Eternity, like infinity, is a necessary appre- 
hension. 'No mind thinks at all without taking 
both for granted. For example, you cannot 
think of space without thinking of it as having 
no possible limits. To illustrate this remark let 
us suppose that the farthest bit of star-dust that 
comes across the lens of the telescope, of a clear, 
cold winter night, is so far removed from us that 
with the quickest motion which we can conceive, 
it would take millions of years to reach it. Then 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 73 

take that conception as your inch measure and 
travel, in imagination till your mind simply falls 
down exhausted, and you are then in the center 
of space, just as you were when you started. 
You have not moved one hair-line toward the 
boundary of the unmeasurable. You cannot get 
nearer to it than you are now. Your mind is so 
constituted that in healthy thought you cannot 
fancy yourself ever any nearer to it than you are 
now. I affirm that I cannot begin to think on 
any of the physical propositions which enter into 
the problems of life without taking this thought 
of infinite space for granted. It is just as neces- 
sary to any clear thinking, as any of the common 
postulates of the mind. 

It is the same with the apprehension of the 
thought of time. Its first assertion comes to us 
as it ought to have done, from the center of that 
dry desert of the Peninsula of Sinai, and from the 
lips of Moses as he looked up to the heavens or 
to the everlasting hills around, and his thought 
put on the stately march of the world's first lyric 
poem as he said it : '' Before the mountains were 
brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the 
earth and the world, even from everlasting to 
everlasting thou art — Ael,' i, e,, the Strong Up- 
holder of all. The mind of man as man, refuses 
4 



74 . ETERNAL— ITS USES, 

any limit to either of these thoughts. You can- 
not escape from them. They haunt you as 
dreams of childhood. They are the deep under- 
tone of the bass notes of life. They are so low 
that the ear refuses to determine their place on 
the chromatic scale. You have this feeling in the 
sough of the wind in the pines ; in the deep thun- 
der of the midnight sky, or in the ceaseless beat 
of the surf on the ocean beaches. It comes in 
the — as we say — boundless horizon of the ocean, 
or the prairie, which we journey over day after 
day, and yet the sign of any end is still as remote 
as when we began. That old Israelitish religion 
was cradled in the very arms of this nurture. 
Every religion of earth, then, and since outside of 
it, has dealt largely in efforts to determine and 
use this very idea of eternity. The older Brah- 
minical and Egyptian religions dealt constantly 
and sublimely in the effort to exhaust this notion. 
Every Oriental heresy of the Church which offered 
to accept the Jewish religion where Christ left it, 
sought to engraft on it this system of thought. 
As long as Christianity lay cradled in the East, 
the continual story of it was the record of efforts 
to compel it to adopt some of the Oriental 
theories of ceoizs, of these atom-integers by which 
men had tried to spell out eternity. Any unin- 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 



75 



Spired man taught as Moses was, in all the wis- 
dom of the Egyptians, would inevitably have 
given room to some sort of scheme of spanning 
the abysses of thought, either by transmigrations, 
or by Brahminical surges back into the original 
Godhead. All manner of fancies and conceits 
have been tried and have had their day, in a vain 
struggle to weave this idea into the practical mor- 
als of mankind. Continually failing, it continually 
returns. It is a necessary idea, in any thought 
of the Creator of all things. 

II. But practically it is an impossible thought. 
The only attempt to express it is by a paradox. 
We talk of a " circle whose center is everywhere, 
and whose circumference is nowhere.'' But it is 
paradoxical conceit. It is merely giving it up as 
inconceivable. It is a learned way of saying no- 
thing. It is science trying to believe. There is as 
much impossibility, or rather impotence in grasp- 
ing the idea, as there is compulsion to attempt it.^ 

* " The Absolute and the htfijiite are thus, like the Inconceivable 
and the Imperceptible ^ names indicating, not an object of thought 
or of consciousness at all, but the mere absence of the conditions 
under which consciousness is possible. The attempt to construct 
in thought an object answering to such names, necessarily ends in 
contradiction ; a contradiction, however, which we have ourselves 
produced by the attempt to think ; which exists in the act of 
thought, but not beyond it ; which destroys the conception as such, 
but indicates nothing concerning the existence or non-existence of 



^6 ETERNAL— ITS USES, 

True philosophy has settled down on the convic- 
tion, that the idea of eternity is absolutely neces- 
sary, only as we think of God, and of no one else. 
True philosophy gets back after these vain efforts 
at definition, to Isaiah's conviction of One Being 
who inhabiteth eternity, or to the apostle's word, 
" One, who only hath immortality/' 

There is need in our thought of either the eter- 
nity of matter, or of the eternity of one creative 
cause, who exists before and beneath matter. 
The revelation of that Being stands to-day on the 
thought of the poet of '' one great First Cause, 
least understood." Moses placed himself on the 
monotheistic citadel in assuming the existence of 
this cause, without a word of proof. '^ In the be- 
ginning God created " the world. And no one 
has yet gone behind his fact. Isaiah saw God in- 
habiting eternity, and dwelling alone. In the 
whole Bible, the word immortality is never used 
as the attribute of any person save God ; and 

that which we try to conceive. It proves our impotence, and it 
proves nothing more. Or rather, it indirectly leads us to believe in 
the existence of that Infinite which we cannot conceive ; for the 
denial of its existence involves a contradiction, no less than the 
assertion of its conceivability. We thus learn that the provinces 
of Reason and Faith are not co-extensive ; that it is a duty, en- 
joined by Reason itself, to believe in that which we are unable to 
comprehend." — Li?nits of Religious Thought ^ Maunsell. Lectures 
ii. and \\\.^ passim. 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 



77 



then but once.^ St. Paul, in one of those light- 
ning flashes of his, contrasts the present humble 
confession of the martyrs, with the glory that 
shall be theirs, which God will show, '' the blessed 
and only potentate, the King of kings and Lord 
of lords ; who only hath iinmortality^ dwelling in 
light which no man can approach unto : whom no 
man hath seen nor can see ; to whom be honor 
and power everlasting. Amen.^'f Once only does 
the Scripture speak of an endless life. Christ, 
the High Priest of the Church, is " made such, not 
after the law of a carnal commandment, but after 
the power of a7Z endless lifey\ The word is equiv- 
alent to indestructible J and covers the period of 
the world's needs. 

HI. We come now directly to the peculiar use 
of the word by which we express eternity in com- 
mon morals. One law is plain as ruling in the 
Bible in all matters of morals. It never goes be- 
yond the horizon of facts that are practical, when 
it can avoid it : it states as little as is required 
while there, and it gets back as soon as may be to 
common ground. Its words for eternity are all 

* The word (x^daya6ia is used, i Cor. xv. 53, 54, of that spiri- 
tual body which ** this mortal " will put on. It is equivalent to the 
word im- {i. e.^ not) mortality. The word d'il:^ap6ia is twice 
rendered immortality. — Rom. ii. 7 ; 2 Tim. i. 10. 

f I Tim. vi. 16. X Heb. viii. 16. 



7^8 ETERNAL— ITS USES. 

regulated by this divine instinct.^ They set be- 
fore us a definite fact and stop at it. When we 
are on the sea, and out of sight of land, we have 
one hemisphere and one horizon around us. In 
crossing the ocean we change them all the time, and 
have as many hemispheres and horizons as we have 
days. On the vaster sea of unlimited ages we can 
imagine these units of separate horizons according 
to the subject before us, now covering the time 
of one covenant, and then covering the times of 
all the covenants, and we have the practical use 
of the Hebrew words for eternity and everlasting. 
Thus, in Genesis, we hear of the everlasting hills ; 
in Habakkuk, of the everlasting mountains ; in 

* Bishop Lowth commenting on the words *' everlasting cove- 
nant " (Jer. xxxii. 40) says : " The Jewish covenant, with respect to 
the ceremonial ordinances contained in it, is sometimes called an 
^7'^r/<2j-//;?^ covenant (see Gen. xvii. 13 ; Lev. xxiv. 8 ; Isa. xxiv. 5) ; 
berith olani in the Hebrew, because those ordinances were to con- 
tinue for a long succession of time, called olam^ in that language 
(see note on xxv. 9), and to last till the new olam, or * the age of 
the Messias,' called di^v jneXXcov, * the age,* or * the world to 
come,* Heb. ii. 5 ; vi..5. But when this expression is applied to 
the Gospel covenant, there is peculiar emphasis contained in it, im- 
plying that it should never be abolished, or give way to any other 
dispensation (see Jer. 1. 5 ; Isa. Iv. 3 ; compare with Ps. Ixxxix. 
3A, 35)-'' On ch. xxv. 9, he says : " The Hebrew word o/am doth 
not always signify eternity, or perpetuity in a strict sense, but is 
sometimes taken for such a duration as had a remarkable period to 
conchide it," etc. The word perpetual, olain, in solitndines sempi- 
ternas, Vu\g,, oveidid/iov diooviov, LXX.,here, ''is to be re- 
strained to the period of seventy years, mentioned ver. 11.'* 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 79 

Exodus, of the everlasting priesthood^ i, e,, the Jew- 
ish, and in Leviticus of the ever lasting statutes of the 
Mosaic covenant. In Numbers, the word eternal 
is translated by the phrase, throiighoiit their genera- 
tions ; which is the one, general meaning of it in 
all these cases. 

Then the kingdom of the Lord Jehovah is, in 
the Psalms, an everlasting kingdom and his domi- 
nion throughout all generations. In the Book of 
Daniel, the proud king Nebuchadnezzar bows his 
head to the God of the prophet. ^^ His kingdom 
is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion from 
generation to generation.'* ''^ In these cases it is 
the relative idea which determines the meaning 
and limits the time. 

Now in all the New Testament, and certainly in 
the text, the word by which we get at the notion 
of eternal^ has this one meaning, of long-continued 
time or duration, an cE07t,\ or, as I have put it, 
an horizon. The Vulgate Bible translates it gener- 
ally, in scBcida scBculoru7n^ or to ages of ages. The 
forever and ever of our Church ascriptions has the 
same force. The Bible is a practical book, meant 

* Dan. iv. 34. 

f See the meanings given to the word by a chassic authority. 
" Always, perpetually, often, frequently, uninterruptedly, succes- 
sively, in uninterrupted succession, at every or at all times, for a 
long while, now.'' — Donnegans Greek Lexicon. See his examples. 



8o ETERNAL—ITS USES, 

for common use among men ; it has lost sight of 
the philosophical idea altogether, and kept almost 
exclusively to the ordinary one, of unlimited time 
or dtiration. When it says eternal life, it does 
not deal with the philosophical thought at all. It 
is only the horizon of its own view at the time 
which comes up to the mind. It calls hills and 
mountains eternal, and yet they perish, by its own 
showing ; it terms the priesthood and the statutes 
of the transient Levitical service eternal, though 
it proves them in their own nature ^^ waxing old 
and vanishing away.'' It covers the times of the 
race of man by the same word, and then when it 
seeks to go higher it simply multiplies the word 
by itself, just as a child would do. Now there 
is only one eternity, as there is only one space. 
Two eternities are an absurdity. The very use of 
the plural of aeons, or ages, proves that the word 
did not convey the philosophic idea to its writers. 
It simply means a duration, which for all practical 
purposes, is not limited ; not that it has no limit, 
but that for the purposes of the writer the limit is 
not drawn. 

Now this has been a dull argument, but it is 
important, in my judgment, for it is by mixing 
things which come to us from two different sources 
that the Scripture has been faulted, and difficulties 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 8 1 

raised against it, that are due to the reader, and not 
to the book. The Bible does not of itself raise the 
perplexities which men find in the subject of eter- 
nal punishment. They are made by mixing phi- 
losophy and revelation. '' But," says some one, '^ you 
must mix them somehow.'' I am doubtful of that 
necessity. Here is where it is better to be '^ con- 
verted and become as little children.'' Here the 
confessed ignorance of the trained scholar is better 
than " the wisdom of the wise " of this world, which 
God has confounded. 

Thus, to apply the argument, the revelation tells 
one of the horizons, up to the day of its finality, 
which is the day of judgment. Clouds and dark- 
ness lie all around the line. Here and there a ray 
of light shoots off into the darkness, and we see 
that the same God who is dwelling in the thick 
darkness, and doing us good, is .ruling there as 
here, and we take courage. The waves heave and 
roll under us, and we feel the storms which come 
to us from far-off regions. But the Bible tells us 
of the true chart and gives us the magnetic mys- 
tery of an all-conquering faith, by which we can 
outlive them. The book is not an astronomy, 
and despite the monks, Galileo once for all assert- 
ed it. The world owes him all thanks for his 
success. It is not a cosmogony, and geologists 
4"" 



82 ETERNAL— ITS USES. 

no longer fear the penalties of heresy for their 
fidelity to science. It is not in the broader sense 
a philosophy of eternity, and it is free from the 
perplexities which men are pressing upon it just 
now. It covers the ground taken by the natural 
conscience : that there is a broad horizon, begin- 
ning with "In the beginning, God created'' — and 
ending with, "Even so come. Lord Jesus.'' It 
opens with the race in its primeval purity, and 
tells the sad tale of 

^Hhat forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe, 
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
Restore us and regain the blissful seat.'' 

It ends with that full story of redemption, illus- 
trated by the history of one nation, as the para- 
digm of the ways of God. It is because it refuses 
to raise these questions about a philosophic eter- 
nity that it fails to satisfy them. 

In the middle ages, when such savages as the 
German Henry, or such giant-brutes as Charles 
the Bold, held men's lives and women's chastity 
in perpetual dread of their lawless tyranny, the 
best men of the Church read out of the Bible the 
autocracy of the Bishop of Rome and the miracle 
of transubstantiation. The conscience of the age 
accepted both dogmas. We read neither now, for 



ETERNAL— ITS USES. 



83 



we need neither. '' Ah/' says some one, '^ a book 
that means all things, means nothing." Look 
again ! Hildebrand, when he combated tyranny 
for the rights of the poor, and Radbertus, when 
he made the elements of the mass pregnant with 
superstitious horrors for the sensual souls of ma- 
rauding barons and robber chieftains, both read 
alike with us, and with all good men, the one 
great lesson of the book : '' How God would have 
all men live in purity and charity toward all, that 
they might please him in righteousness and truth 
all the days of their life." The Light of the world 
stands on the rock of ages, like Minot's ledge 
light in the salt waves of Boston Bay. Winter 
gathers its piles of ice and frozen spray around 
that slender shaft of stone. The dark fogs con- 
geal around the lantern, and the lighthouse-keeper, 
as he struggles to keep to his duty, might well 
chant the De profundis of Jonah of old — if he had 
heart to chant at all. But the sailor, as the 
snowy storm from Labrador rages around him, 
looks to the light, and catching a passing glimmer 
of it, makes his way to the haven west of him. 
Again the summer sea rolls its tiny waves peace- 
fully along the Cohasset rocks, and makes music 
as we pass the same spot with song and glee. The 
snow and ice are all gone, and the winds are all 



84 ETERNAL— ITS USES. 

lulled to rest, but the light shines on the same. It 
is only the scene that has changed, not the light. 
The winter storms could not quench it. Let us 
see to it that the quiet does not tempt us to 
neglect it. 

So finally, I am forced to the conclusion that 
eternal life and eternal death, or punishment, are 
relative terms. By that I mean, they cover just 
so much ground as the conscience and reason, 
illuminated by the Spirit of Christ, needs to have 
covered, and no more. This is an humbling ad- 
mission. 

It is so much the fashion in our later divinities 
to assume. for man a future eternity, in the philo- 
sophic sense of absolute unendingness, that it may 
cause some of you to start at this admission con- 
cerning eternity, as if all things must come to an 
end, if we admit the contrary. It is easy to say 
that, in the text, if the life is eternal, the punish- 
ment must be. By the mere words, this is true. 
Or to say again, " If the punishment is shortened, 
then the glory of the saints must be curtailed.'' I 
admit this by the words alone. But is evil eter- 
nal ? Is death self-vivified and non-dying for- 
ever.^ In the absolute infinity of future time is 

■^ I confine the admission of equality of duration to the words 
alone. When we regard the ideas of life and death, the equality 



ETERNAL— ITS USES, 85 

there to be no possible end of evil ? And of all 
evils conceivable by us, in our little sphere, what 
compares for a moment with that of the infinite 
suffering of our own brothers and friends ? I con- 
fess that my mind is so made up by nature and 
education, that I cannot conceive of the eternity of 
evil. It is not the horror of it, not any passional 
excitement about it that gives me a choice, but it 
is the inability of the mental power to believe in a 
good God and an eternal evil ; in other words, in 
an eternal devil. For one, I am willing to accept 
immortality, on the same conditions that I am 
living on to-day. If I wake up in eternity, to find 

vanishes. Life is and of itself exists ; duration belongs to it. 
Mere death is not-being, and has 171 se no duration. The two fol- 
lowing extracts, from the work before quoted, are suggestive to 
the thoughtful mind : 

'* In ninety-nine instances out of every hundred in which the 
issue of God's judgment is referred to, its effect is declared to be 
to bring the subjects of it to an end which is described as death, 
destruction J perishing ^ perishing utterly, corruption ; and, nega- 
tively, as exclusion from life or life eternal. Such phrases as 
endless woe, endless inisery, are unknown to the Bible. The or- 
dinary language of the pulpit on this subject is systematically un- 
scriptural. 

" The radical idea of destruction, that is extinction of being, is 
first taken out of the term death ; then the word is made to stand 
for its opposite, eternal being; and then the associated idea of 
misery is grafted upon the stock of the converted primary ; the 
result being that destriictio7t stands for endless misery." — Life in 
Chfist, pp. 356-7. 

See also Appendix A. 



86 ETERNAL— ITS USES. 

myself mistaken in a thousand things— and I ex- 
pect to do so — I now recognize myself as a religious 
being, so far as I feel sure of one single thing; 
that I can go nowhere and be nowhere, in either 
space or time, and not find that God is good, and 
that Jesus Christ was his only true Revealer. In 
the faith of what he has said of God, I am willing 
to meet the Day of Judgment : when as the com- 
mon voice of humanity always and everywhere has 
declared. Pagan, Jew, Christian alike, he will judge 
the world in righteousness : and I expect to find, 
that all that his Son has said will be tremendously 
true ; and to hear his sentence in some manner 
which will be echoed by all the myriads of man- 
kind : " these shall go away into everlasting pun- 
ishment, and the righteous into everlasting life." 
Then — and what it means from the inspired lips 
of John the Divine, I cannot tell now, but I ex- 
pect to know then — two fierce monsters, two great 
living horrors which have ruled the fears of men 
in iron bondage, shall be dragged to the foot of 
the throne and receive their sentence. ''And 
Death and Hell (Hades, where the souls of men are 
now) shall be cast into the lake of fire.'' And 
the sigh of relief that will come from all the living 
creatures around the throne will take words and 
utter, ^^This is the second death." But pause and 



ETERNAL— ITS USES, ' 8/ 

look! Jesus rises from feis throne. One scene still 
remains, to close the inspired volume. ^.*Then 
Cometh the End, when he shall have delivered up 
the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he 
shall have put down all rule, and all authority and 
power. For he must reign — and he has then — till 
he hath put all things under his feet. The last 
enemy that shall be destroyed is death ; for he 
hath put all things under his feet." Then he 
breaks the golden scepter of his righteous reign, 
his everlasting dominion which there ends in form, 
for every mystery in it is ended, every evil con- 
quered, and '' himself is subject to Him that put 
all things under him, that God may be all in 
all." ^ 

Up to this point, I understand the Bible and 



■^ " It cannot therefore be denied, that if the restoration is sanc- 
tioned in any passage, it is in this. However, the defenders of 
this doctrine should not overlook the fact, that neither here nor 
in any other passage of the Sacred Scriptures is the final recovery 
of all evil men, nay, even of demons and Satan himself, expressed 
openly and in a definite form ; a circumstance calculated to awaken 
serious reflection as to the propriety of making such an opinion 
the subject of public instruction." — Ohhausen on I Cor. xv. 28, and 
the note of the same : ' ^ Patil never openly speaks of the restirrectioti 
of the ivicked. However, there certainly appear in the Holy Scrip- 
tures, and doubtless for wise motives, contradictory doctrines on 
this important point ; and for this reason we should do well to leave 
their enigmatical stateme7its to the indefiniteness in which they have 
been given to us.'' 



88 ETERNAL—ITS USES, 

Nature in all her realms of plant and insect, and 
bird and beast, yea, and yearning living souls, to 
reach. Beyond it, I hear no voice to guide me, 
but the feeble mutterings of that wisdom of the 
world which as St. Paul none too truly said, is 
foolishness with God, as it surely has been foolish- 
ness in men. 



V. 

DOCTRINE OF THE OLD 
TESTAMENT.* 

Genesis, xviii. 25. — Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right? 

'TT^HIS question of Abraham addressed to that 
■** remarkable person who appeared to him 
in the plains of Mamre, is simply grand in its 
boldness, in its instinctive trustfulness, and in its 
expressing the solid foundation of the faith on 
which all religion is built. It is the first question 
of the religious spirit, it is the last question of 
every perplexity, after the purest heart has strug- 
gled back on the stairway of revelation, into the 
presence of God. It is the amulet of the pious 
soul in all things that happen here below. The 
one creed that is common to all good men is, '^ that 
God is, and that he is the rewarder of all that 
diligently seek him.'' f The question is exquisitely 
beautiful. What Abraham was thinking of the 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Feb. 24, 1878. 
f Heb. xi. 6. 

89 



go DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

strange personage before him we can now only con- 
jecture. He certainly recognized the fact, some- 
how, that he had in his hands the power of life 
and death over all the people of the cities of the 
plain. He evidently felt that the time of plead- 
ing for them was short, that the day of vengeance 
was at hand, and that the approaching destruction 
was horrible. It would seem that the other two 
^' men,'' as they are called,^ had left him alone 
with this One, whom he saw to be the superior 
personage, and that they were speeding to con- 
summate the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. 
He urges his plea, therefore, for the guilty cities 
with a hurried forgetfulness of logic, '^ Let the few 
righteous interpose for the many sinners of these 
cities.'' Trembling, the patriarch must have been, 
for he is in the presence of God, the Avenger. He 
says : ^' I have taken upon me to speak unto Jeho- 
vah." He is not intimidated : " Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right?" It is a grand 
boldness. It certainly allows us to found in calm 
logic all reasonings of the future judgment on the 
human idea of perfect justice, and to insist on all 
doubtful interpretations being strictly subjected 
to that rule. In all things which are not doubtful, 

* Gen. xviii. 2, 22. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



91 



I grant that it is impiety to attempt to be more 
just than God, or wiser than the Omniscient. But 
it is not for any man, or any set of men, to claim 
the like respect for any of their interpretations, no 
matter how probable they may seem. 

Priests and doctors talk to us of the duty of the 
common people submitting the reason to the dog- 
mas which they claim as inferences from revela- 
tion. To revelation itself I bow without a ques- 
tion, when I know it to be such, but to no man's 
inferences from it. I see here God himself appeal- 
ing to the great heart which he has given men. 
I hear from Abraham that divinest plea for mercy, 
which makes the music of humanity — which rose 
from the cross — which rises to-day on a poet's 
lips : 

" And through the dreary realm of man's despair 

Star-crowned an angel walks, and lo ! God's hope is there.'' 

It is, then, with this principle in mind that I ask 
you to look carefully at the condition of souls 
after death, as it lies in the Old Testament. The 
chief importance of this examination just here is 
this : we shall then see clearly how the subject 
was correlated to the words of Christ, which I 
have already given concerning the valley of Ge- 
henna. No other ideas must then be associated, 
as of necessity, with his words concerning Gehenna, 



92 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 



than such as naturally belonged to them in the 
usage of his age. . 

I. First, the Israelites did certainly use the same 
general words for the dwelling-place of all the dead, 
whether saints or sinners. The good and the bad 
persons were supposed to go to the same places. 
If you and I were standing by the coffins of Ahab, 
the terrible Macbeth of his day, or of Josiah, the 
noble and pious reformer of a later period, the 
same scriptural words would come to our lips, con- 
cerning each king, if we take those words as we 
now find them in the Old Testament. They had 
one word for the habitation of all the dead. It was 
the word"^ Sheol, the hollow, vast, under-ground 
vault. It is the word which is translated hell in 
the English Bible. It is the word which we have 
in the Apostles' Creed : ^' He descended into hell,'' 
i, e., Christ descended thither. Christ descended, 
as the rubric before the Creed gives it, into '' the 
place of departed spirits." Now, I take it for 
granted, just here, that no one supposes that Christ 
went to the lake of fire, or in any intelligible sense 
went into the bottomless pit of the damned. Even 
Calvin, that man of iron nerve and ice-bound 
heart, going through the thoughts of God's book, 
like Spenser's iron man Talus, with crashing flail, 

* It is rendered '' the grave,'' thirty-three times. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 



93 



cleaving his way by main force, did not dare to 
say this, but made a hell for Christ, as on the 
cross, there enduring all that God's wrath could 
add of infinite horrors and agonies, to what men 
and devils did to the meek Sufferer. It means in 
the- Creed only this, that he really died, not in 
appearance, but in fact ; died truly and verily, and 
that his soul was parted from the body, as any 
other soul is parted from any other body, and 
went, as St. Peter says, '^ to the spirits in ward." "^ 
The Nicene Creed has very much the same thought 
in the words, ^' He suffered and was buried.*' 

Now, Sheol comes from a verb, sJia-al^ which 
means,: i, to dig or hollow out a place ; 2, to ask 
or question. It is well to note just here, that 
it has no sort of idea of punishment of any kind, 
peculiar to it. I give you the meanings of the 
word on the authority of the lexicon alone, and 
of all others, that of Gesenius, who is of the best 
reputation for his passionless science on such 
points. He treats it thus: '* Sheol, Hades, Orcus, 
the under-world ; Sept, usually, aSrf^^ or once, 
'^avaro^^ Death ; f a vast subterranean place;:]: 
full of thick darkness where dwell the shades of 
the dead ; to which are poetically ascribed valleys, 

* I Pet. iii. ig. f 2 Sam. xxii. 6. 

\ Job, xi. 8 ; Deut. xxxii. 22. 



Q4 DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 

and also gates and bars. The dying are said to 
go down to Sheol. Those who save the Hfe of 
any one are said to deHver him from Sheol. Else- 
where Sheol is said to devour all ; to be insatiable ; 
to be stern and cruel. To it, by prosopopoeia, are 
ascribed snares, with which it lies in wait for men : 
and those who escape death are said to make a 
covenant with Sheol. By metonymy, Sheol is put 
for its inhabitants. As to the etymology, it is a 
cavity, a hollow, subterranean place ; just as the 
German, hollen, hell, is originally the same with 
hohle, a hollow cavern, and as the Latin cceliim is 
from the Greek 7i:ozAo5, hollow. The usual deriva- 
tion has been from the notion of asking, demand- 
ing, since Orcus lays claim unsparingly to all alike, 
whence the epithet " Orcus rapaxT Thus far the 
lexicon. It is the classic decision of the point, 
and, I think, is generally unquestioned by the best 
scholars. It is not the sect-notion of any preacher. 
It is the judicial decision of the linguist. You will 
notice that there is nothing of punishment in the 
word. It is the under-ground world into which all 
men go alike, good and bad. It is the twin word 
w^ith death or the grave. Poetically it becomes in 
imagination a great, monstrous being, filled with 
rage and cruel passion, as St. Paul once uses it in 
his cry of victory over it : '' O death, where is thy 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 



95 



sting? O hell {i, ^., Sheol, or Hades), where is thy 
victory?" And to make the cut of this thought 
more clear, St. John at last sees both these vam- 
pires, as two great giants, whose fury is spent, cast 
into the lake of fire, not to be burned forever and 
ever, but to be burned up^ as no longer having any 
right to be. 

The inhabitants of this under-world were sup- 
posed to have been of greater size than ordinary, 
as if the darkness of the place gave it to them. 
So ghosts, when wandering in graveyards, always 
gain something in size on the imagination of the 
timid. The grandest poetical passage of the Old 
Testament upon this place is that where the Pro- 
phet Isaiah personifies the Empire of Babylon, as 
if he saw it in the person of its king, going down 
to destruction, under the power of God, to make 
room for the prosperity of his beloved Israel."^ 
^^ Hell [Sheol] from beneath is moved for thee, to 
meet thee at thy coming ; she stirreth up the dead 
for thee, all the chief ones of the earth ; she hath 
raised up from their thrones all the kings of the 
nations. All they shall speak unto thee. Art 
thou become weak as we ? art thou become like 
unto us? Thy pomp is brought down to Sheol, 
the noise of thy viols ; the worm is spread 

* Is. xiv. 9. 



g6 DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT- 

under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art 
thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer \i. e,, Day Star, 
Light-Bearer], son of the morning ! '' The whole 
passage is too long to cite here. But it shows 
clearly what were the general notions of this 
under-vault, or deeper grave of the shades of men, 
in the imaginations of the Israelites. Into it went 
all men. It was dark, vast, subterranean, silent, 
temporary ; filled with sleeping-places for the souls 
of saints and sinners. To Job, as he looked to it, 
it was a place of thickest darkness.*^ '' Are not 
my days few ? Cease — let me alone, that I may 
take comfort a little, before I go whence I shall 
not return, to the land of darkness and the shadow 
of death. A land of darkness, as darkness — of the 
shadow of death, without any order, and where the 
light is as darkness.'* The Psalmist asks in a sea of 
troubles : ^' Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead ? 
Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy 
loving-kindness be declared in the grave ? or thy 
faithfulness in destruction ? Shall thy wonders be 
known in the dark, and thy righteousness in the 
land of forgetfulness ? " f He answers the ques- 
tion : '' The dead praise not the Lord, neither any 
that go down into silence.'* ;}: And again: ^* For 
in death there is no remembrance of thee : in the 

* Job, X. 21, 22. f Ps. Ixxxviii. 10-12. X Ps. cxv. 17. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 



97 



grave [Sheol], who shall give thee thanks ? " "^ 
Again, '' What profit is there in my blood, when I 
go down to the pit ? Shall the dust praise thee ? 
Shall it declare thy truth?" f Thus King Heze- 
kiah prays against death : '^ For the [Sheol] grave 
cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee ; 
they that go down to the pit cannot hope for thy 
truth. The living, the living, he shall praise thee, 
as I do this day ; the father to the children shall 
make known thy truth." \ Does the psalmist say 
that ** the wicked and they who forget God, shall 
go to Hades, or Sheol " ? He also says that he 
himself will be there. It was the common lot. It 
was a word just as applicable to the future of 
good men as to bad ; yea, speaking in the name of 
the sinless Messiah, he says : " Thou wilt not leave 
my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see 
corruption." § And St. Peter, in the great ser- 
mon of Pentecost, catches at this word, thus : 
" The patriarch David is both dead and buried, 
and his sepulcher is with us unto this day. There- 
fore being a prophet, and knowing God's promises, 
he spake it of Christ, that his soul was not left in 
hell, nor did his flesh see corruption." | 

Now it is evident, thus far, that there is no 

* Ps, vi. 5. f Ps. XXX. g. if Is. xxxviii. 18. 

§ Ps. xvi. 10. [ Acts, ii. 29-31. 

5 



gS DOCTRINE OF THE OED TESTAMENT. 

meaning of future punishment in this word, which 
is translated hell in the Old Testament. I have 
shown before that the true word of punishment is 
that used for the first time by Christ himself. I 
pass to another use of the Old Testament. The 
first burials of the bodies of men of which we 
hear in the early ages of the world, were in 
caverns. On the death of Sarah, Abraham 
bought the cave of Machpelah, '^ that he might 
bury his dead out of his sight. "^ It is interesting 
to know in passing, that, at this late day, of all 
the tombs and sepulchers and mausoleums of 
earth, that one has never yet been touched by 
profane hands. However men have differed, as 
Israelites, Christians, or Mussulmans, on other 
matters, they have always held to the one rever- 
ence for the faith, and guarded the slumbers of 
the ^^ father of many nations.'' Abraham sleeps 
there to-day, side by side with the dust of her 
who followed him as a faithful wife in all his 
wanderings. Thither in due time came Isaac, and 
Rebekah, and Leah, and afterward from distant 
Egypt, with strange pomp and circumstance of 
mourning, Jacob. Now, I do not say that it was 
because of this custom of burial, but certainly it 
was in keeping with it that the common phrase 

, „ . * Gen. xxiii. 4. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 



99 



came up on the page of Scripture to describe a 
man's departure from earth, ^^ he was gathered to 
his fathers,'' or ''\\Q sleeps with his fathers.'* Its 
opposite was to be cast forth to the fowls of the 
air and the beasts of the earth, to be disgraced 
with the burial of a dog or an ass. This phrase 
seems to have satisfied the Israelites for ages, as 
the only question to be raised at death. They 
used it indiscriminately of the good and the bad. 
Abijam, son of the rebel Jeroboam, and fit son of 
his evil sire : Joram, child of Ahab, the worst of 
the kings, and walking in the ways of his father, 
and Menahem, utterly detested by every good 
man in his age, each slept with his fathers, as well 
as the pious David, the wise Solomon, and the re- 
former, Josiah. This was all they said of them. 
As the pious Jew stood by the side of an en- 
shrouded friend or foe, there was somehow in his 
mind the text, and little else : '' Shall not the 
Judge of all the earth do right?" I do not doubt 
for a moment that human nature was then what 
it is now ; that there were denunciations and 
woes which marked the rash judgments of men 
then as they do now. But, and this is all that we 
are* to ask now, do they appear on the page of 
the inspired word of God, so that they become 
rules for us in the explanations of the future con- 



lOO DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ditions of men in eternity? There is a marked 
absence in all the Old Testament of any such 
language. ' A man has gone to his fathers ! he 
has gone to the receptacle for all living ! he has 
gone to Sheol — the world of shades — the under- 
grave/ seems to have been the utmost of their 
common creed. 

I pause here to instance one apparent ex- 
ception which will show how easy it is to fall into 
error. Hear the prophet Isaiah : ^ '* For Tophet is 
ordained of old ; yea, for the king it is prepared ; 
he hath made it deep, large ; the pile thereof, fire 
and much wood ; the breath of the Lord like a 
stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.'' ^^ What 
more,'' some one asks, ^^ can be desired than this, to 
show that the Jews did believe in the fiercest 
notion of hell?" Let us look at it. It is this 
same valley of Tophim, or drum-place, where they 
burned the children so that evil mothers and 
baser fathers might wash their consciences clean 
and wholesome and sweet again. And, at the 
first sight it seems as if we had here all that 
Christ said about it ages afterward. But it has 
no such meaning, as may be learnedly proved by 
classic argument, if we had to do with scholars. 
See ! Tophet is ordained of old — the margin 

* Ch. XXX. 33. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, iqi 

says, very properly, from yesterday. That is the 
Hebrew. The " of old " is rfot very old. The As- 
syrian king Sennacherib is looming in the proph- 
et*s vision. He is approaching for the destruction 
of the city. He will not accomplish it in person, 
but it will come none the less, and Jerusalem 
shall yet be made like Tophet, and her houses 
shall be defiled as that foul place ; her citizens 
shall be slain there by the Assyrians, as again 
they will be crucified by the Romans till room 
shall fail for them. It is in no sense of future 
eternal punishment that the prophet is speaking, 
but of that inevitable destruction of the city of 
Jerusalem, which was sure to issue from its 
crimes, and which its corruptions made neces- 
sary."^' You have the same thought in Jeremy :f 
"They have built the high places of Tophet, 
which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to 
burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, 
which I commanded them not, neither came it 
into my heart. Therefore, the days come, saith 
the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, 
nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the 
valley of slaughter, for they shall bury in Tophet 

* The running title at the head of the chapter, in our Bible, 
reads : *' God's wrath, and the people's joy in the destrtiction of As- 
syria.'' \ Jer. vii. 32. 



102 DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 

till there be no place/' Twice did that fearful 
tide of blood and fire sweep over that fatal place. 
The Jews who listened to the Sermon on the 
Mount, as our Lord caught up this word for a 
new and deeper use, knew of one occasion in 
their history, and some of them were destined to 
experience the evils of the second destruction. 
Go and look at the two destructions of Jerusalem, 
and ask if all the best interests of mankind were 
not promoted in the main by either event. It 
surely is not the revelation of the sinners' hell — 
though it is regularly made to do wretched ser- 
vice for it in the mouths of the ignorant. 

Once more. There are some striking events in 
the history of the Old Covenant which bear on 
this theme. The Flood in the days of Noah, the 
destruction of the cities of the plain, and the over- 
throw of the armies of Pharaoh in the Red Sea, 
became the instructive lessons in the mouths of 
the prophets of the ways of God. They entered 
into the poetry of inspired prophecy and psalm. 
Thus Hosea exhorted the backsliders of his day 
in these words : '' How shall I give thee up, 
Ephraim ? or deliver thee, Israel? How shall I 
make thee as Admah ? or set thee as Zeboim ? My 
heart is turned within me. My repentings are 
kindled together.'' Another patriotic prophet 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 103 

sees Babylon overthrown, as Sodom and Go- 
morrah. The book of Isaiah closes with words 
which tremble on the edge of the coming revela- 
tion of one great holy Catholic Church of all the 
nations of the earth, which was to take the place 
of the older, narrower, and imperfect Covenant. 
He sees the saints of that nobler system '^go 
forth and look upon the carcasses of the men that 
have transgressed against me ; for. their worm 
shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched ; 
and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.'' "^ 

It was here on the tremble of this thought that 
Christ began his revelation of the last things. 
But I claim that the definite revelation of the 
future world, either for joy or sorrow, so far as 
this present discussion is intended, is not to be 
found in the Old Testament. It was in no sense 
the intention of that covenant to do either. It 
was emphatically Christ " who brought light and 
immortality to light in the Gospel," and with it, 
sketched in shadows, the conditions on which men 
will receive it. The Law in all its parts and or- 
dinances had only ^^ a shadow of good things to 
come." Its ^^ weakness and unprofitableness'' 
were manifest. It made nothing perfect, but was 
the bringing In of a better hope, by the which we 

* Is. Ixvi. 24. 



I04 DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 

draw nigh unto God. These last things were 
held by it in shadows.^ The shadows, it is true, 
were from the coming Sun of Righteousness, and 
they indicated the general lines of future revela- 
tions — but they were shadows still. 

We have in the book of Ecclesiasticus, which 
is not inspired, but which is a very important 
testimony, the last thoughts of writers and 
teachers among the Jews of the age just be- 
fore Christ; and it is all summed up in the 
practical wisdom of a worldly policy, as if the 

^ I do not enter here on the consideration of Daniel xii. 2, 3, for 
lack of space. While the unlearned reader of the Bible can see 
no difficulty in explaining the meaning of these verses on the com- 
mon theories of the day, it is certain that the learned will pause 
in their decision. The following quotations may show the reasons 
of my silence. '' To whom and to what do these verses (1-3) re- 
fer? The primary application seems clear. The phrases * at 
that time,* * a time of trouble/ ' the wise/ ' the understanding 
ones,' closely connect these verses with the previous chapter (xi. 
40). Therefore if the latter portion of chapter xi. refers primarily 
to events connected with the last days of Antiochus Epiphanes,the 
opening verses of chap. xii. may be taken to refer to the same 
period." — Speaker s Connnentary in loco. 

I should be glad to know that the questions which have exer- 
cised the ingenuity and baffled the research of many of the best 
scholars of all past times, concerning " the eternal and mysterious 
Israelite," " the Apocalyptic Seer, who would revive again in the 
nation's utmost need," " tarrying till the Lord come," could be 
settled. But where the concurrence of such critics as Bentley, 
Arnold, Milman, and Thirlwall, in England ; as Gesenius, Ewald, 
Bleek, De Wette, and Kuenan, compels the doubts which arise, 
I must leave the passage undetermined. 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 105 

whole matter was at last recognized as out of 
their reach. '' My son, let tears fall down over 
the dead, and begin to lament, as if thou hadst 
suffered great harm thyself ; and then cover 
his body according to the custom, and neglect 
not his burial. When the dead is at rest, let 
his remembrance rest; and be comforted for 
him.^* ^ 

The doctrine then of the Israelites on the whole 
subject, in my judgment, lies practically in the 
form of the text : " Shall not the Judge of all the 
earth do right ? " Their knowledge was doubtful 
and shadowy. It was an unsolved question, as 
the light was not communicated to them to an- 
swer it. The " true light " did not shine for them. 
They saw all men die. They could not solve the 
perplexities of varying conditions in life any more 
than we can — the wicked prospering, dying, and 
leaving the rest of their substance to their babes 
— the righteous often oppressed, and suffering and 
perishing from the earth. But it only demanded 
of them a deeper faith in the power of good. 
They saw enough to know that this is God's world, 
that evil must fail at last, that there must be a 
Judge of all the earth, and that he must do right. 

* Ecclus. xxxviii. 



I06 DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Can we read their writings in a like faith, and dis- 
pense with the additions of a later theology ? 
They saw all their friends go, one by one, into the 
earth, from which they had been taken ; and with 
an implied belief in the soul, they consigned them 
to the shades of Sheol, where in rest, in dreamless 
or busy sleep they spent the long night of the 
grave. They did not invent monstrous rules of 
impossible punishments. They left all that in its 
native darkness. I have merely skimmed the sur- 
face of the Hebrew Bible, to show the general 
grounds of what I have asserted — that the hell 
of our common divinity is not found in the Old 
Testament. If I am right in my notion of the re- 
lations of the two Covenants, it ought not to be 
found there. The genius of that old learning ap- 
pears before us like the father of the faithful, 
pleading with God, as man with man, and ask- 
ing, what each man of us must answer for him- 
self, '' Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right ? " 

For one, I find nothing there to check the 
thought of the poet : 

*' Between the dreadful cherubim, 
A Father's love I still discern ! 
As Moses looked of old on him, 

And saw his glory into goodness turn ! 



DOCTRINE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 107 

" For he is merciful as just ; 

And so by faith correcting sight, 
I bow before his will, and trust, 

Howe'er they seem, he doeth all things right. 

" And dare to hope that he will make 

The rugged smooth, the doubtful plain ; 
His mercy never quite forsake ; 

His healing visit every realm of pain." 



VI. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE NEW 
TESTAMENT.* 



JUDE, vii. — Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about 
them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and go- 
ing after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the 
vengeance of eternal fire. 



I TAKE this text as the strongest and severest 
in its tone, in the direction to which I have 
been directing your thoughts, of any in the Bible. 
The short epistle of Jude leaves us little regret 
that it did not come in his way to write more. I 
accept his few words as true and of authority. 
They are strangely imitative of the fiercest mood 
of Peter, and show us* that this man Jude was by 
nature of the sternest and most ascetic temper. I 
take it for granted, from his style, that if there 
had been anything further to be said in this direc- 
tion, he would certainly have said it. So that giv- 
ing to this text every shade of inspired authority, 
short of the words of Christ himself, we have the 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Feb. 24, 1878. 

108 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 109 

severest symbol of the hell of the New Testament 
that can be had. I say, short of the words of 
Christ, for I hold in this case, as in all others, that, 
if the words of Christ on any subject, are enough 
to explain any later assertion of his disciples, then 
we are safe in limiting such words by his pre- 
vious expressions. Some men seem to think, that 
the epistles of the New Testament are all of the 
nature of new and fresh oracular expressions, 
every part of them dictated directly to the writer. 
On the other hand, I think of them as largely 
made up of excellent reasonings, directed by the 
spirit of Christ, upon the facts, which the men 
knew and had received from Christ and from the 
Old Testament. Christ is emphatically the Word 
of God. His revelation is the leaven which was 
cast into the surrounding lump of human soci- 
ety. It was complete and final. The workings of 
that great donation in the. minds of others is 
the proper ideal of the true rule of interpretation 
for all that comes after, except in the few instances 
where a direct oracular communication is claimed. 
They commented on that donation, but did not 
enlarge it. They developed it authoritatively, 
and in the development they necessarily min- 
gled more or less of their own personalities. 
Thus, I do not look on St. Jude as inspired to 



no DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

add anything to this subject of future punish- 
ment, but as speaking out, under the influence of 
"the Mind of Christ," what was deducible from 
what had been said already. So that he gives us 
not only the idea of his age, which any one could 
have done, but, of the inspired thought of his 
time, as to what Christ had taught, which he 
could do as one of the apostles. In presenting to 
you the New Testament doctrine on the condi- 
tion of souls after death, I must rush rapidly 
from point to point. 

The cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, 
were a terrible example to the Old World of the 
crimes to which the Old World was especially 
open — the crimes which follow sensuality and 
lust. The first crime of the savage is murder. 
This is exemplified in Cain. The next crime is 
profane rebellion against law; this has its mourn- 
ful story in the building and confusion of Babel. 
But of all the lessons read to the old and savage 
v/orld, none has the terseness, simplicity, and ter- 
rible force of the story of the Sin of Sodom. It is 
the crime that accompanies the advance of civili- 
zation, and retards and checks its progress. The 
plain of Sodom was as Eden, and as the garden of 
the Lord for fertility and softer beauty. There 
in the purple evening of one fatal day, the corrup- 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. \\\ 

Hon of its inhabitants cuiminated in the gravest 
of crimes known to mankind. Every idea of de- 
cency and of the solemn rites of hospitality had 
vanished, as poor, old, ease-loving Lot read the 
tragic meaning of that triste 7ioche, The morn- 
ing sun rose on the earthquakes and volcanic 
eruptions from the asphaltum beds, beneath the 
fated cities, and soon the sullen waters of the 
Dead Sea rolled heavily over the sunken homes, 
where men had given themselves over to '* fornica- 
tion and going after strange flesh.'* I claim two 
things for this event of the curse of Sodom : 

I. That it was natural. I mean by that only 
that it was consonant to our ideas of natural justice. 

II. That it was a vast mercy, rich in blessing to 
other men in the way it was used in the Bible. 
Blessed be the man who can even burn out a can- 
cer, when other and milder medicines have failed. 
And then twice blessed be he who can by his own 
well-timed suffering show the afflicted everywhere 
h6w to do it. One is reconciled to the natural- 
ness of the destruction of Pompeii, as he sees the 
vile character of the people who were smothered in 
those ashes. So too, one has only to study the 
work of the cool and scientific Gibbon, to know 
that the horrors of the fall of Imperial Rome were 
apart of the old law of '^ the survival of the fittest." 



112 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 

And so the dark, deep caldron of the sea of Us- 
dum lies in the world's history as the solemn 
monitor to all men of the results of crime, when 
God awakes to judge the earth. No one can look 
down on its gloomy and silent vale and not feel 
the wholesome lesson of its destruction. The rest 
of the world was in every way better off without 
the cities of the plain. The rest of the world can- 
not yet spare the sea of salt. It was natural for 
St. Jude to use it as he did. I ask you now to 
note exactly how he did use it. 

I. He says they were corrupted ; '' they gave 
themselves over to fornication, and sodomy." 
Nature itself sets on fire '' the course of nature " of 
every wretch now who does the same. Black- 
well's Island can tell you to a tone of every 
scream and howl that rose on that fatal night 
from Admah and Zeboim. It is the best thing for 
some people to die, no matter what follows death. 

II. St. Jude says that God made them a7i exam- 
ple ; ^*they are set forth for an example.'' Good 
physicians treat men of woe cheerfully, without 
fee, that they may have them for clinical exam- 
ples, and we thank them for it. God wrote this 
law of his, in fire and brimstone, in storm and 
tempest, in order that the grossest and stupidest 
of his scholars might read and understand it. 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 



113 



III. Jude says, " suffering the vengeance of eter- 
nal fire." And this use of the word may show us 
the true use of the phrase in the Bible. For it is 
unquestioned that the people of Gomorrah died 
natural deaths ; died at once, as soon as their phy- 
sical tissues were put properly in contact with the 
blue flames of that horrid caldron. The inhab- 
itants were burned up. Men have fancied that 
they could see the ruins of the cities which were 
destroyed, under the surface of the Dead Sea, but 
no one ever yet has dreamed that the actual peo- 
ple were there still, suffering from the same flames. 
The fire was for a day. It was like any other vol- 
canic eruption, only adopted by a beneficent 
Providence for a purpose ; it has been cooled off 
long ages ago. That the inhabitants should have 
been destroyed, by that or any volcanic eruption, 
is perfectly natural ; is in perfect harmony with 
our knowledge of the creation. The God of na- 
ture does not spare the guilty. We all live by this 
i\ile. Science takes no alarm, and human justice 
receives no shock, when Lisbon goes under in an 
awful earthquake, or London is smitten with a de- 
structive plague, or when, nearer home, we hear of 
. a vessel lost at Kittyhawk, or a train burned at 
Ashtabula Bridge. But who can tell how this 
other idea, begotten of paganism and false science, 



114 



DOCTRIXE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 



first pushed itself into the Christian scheme of tell- 
ing of a loving God ? the idea of Lisbonites always 
sinking in an earthquake : the idea of Londoners' 
always wrestling in the agonies of the black tongue :• 
of women and children shrieking everlastingly in 
the terrors of a perpetuated shipwreck, or common 
railway travelers always burning at Ashtabula, or 
in the oil train at New Hamburgh ? No one here 
believes that St. Jude thought that the fire of 
Sodom was burning in any possible sense in his 
day. When .he said " suffering the vengeance of 
eternal fire,'' he knew that the fire had long before 
gone out. The adjective eternal, as he used it, 
must not be taken at hazard as w^e use it, for it 
makes him speak foolishness. He evidently holds 
up the terrors of this instance as a warning to 
common people, and must have expected them to 
understand him, as speaking common sense. The 
fire by which Sodom perished was, as they knev/, 
not eternal, but the ordinary flames of sulphur and 
bitumen, and the more short-lived for their fierce- 
ness. It is evident that he transferred the idea 
of eternal to th^ finality of the fate, or, as we may 
say, to its thoroughness. They were destroyed by 
fire. It was in vengeance, such vengeance as na- 
ture takes ; in this case used and pointed by the 
sacred hand, that was writing letters on the eternal 



DOCTRINE OF THE NE W TESTAMENT. \ i 5 

wall for all men to see. It was final and it was 
sufficient, in the case of Sodom. 

The law which was represented in that instance 
endures through all the ages to the end — and so is 
eternal — the law, that all things which fail and 
corrupt themselves shall die and be burned up, to 
make room for others. It is the law of the earth 
itself. If it " bring forth herbs meet for them by 
whom it is dressed, it receiveth blessing from God : 
but that which beareth thorns and briers, rejected 
and nigh to cursing, its end is to be burned," ^ not 
everlastingly tormented, but cleansed, burned over, 
and taught by the process how to bear fruitful 
plants. It is this doctrine of '' eternal judgment '' 
that is illustrated by St. Paul, and we have the 
right to urge all the suggestions of his illustration. 
God himself in all nature is ^' a consuming fire *' 
\7tvp naravaXianov^ Sept. for ^^J^, Lev. vi. lo; 
Deut. iv. 24. It signifies to consume wholly\ as 
Moses had said (Deut. iv. 24), and Paul after him 
(Heb. vi. 29). In this sense '' the eternal fire '* is 
used by St. Jude. It is the fire '' of the ages,'' the 
perpetual law of mercy to the good. 

So when Christ says, the fire is not quenched in 
the vale of Gehenna, he does not say, that the filth 
of any one day's offal is always enduring and al- 

* Heb. vi. 7, 8. 



Il6 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

ways burning. The fire does its work, is always 
doing its proper work, it burns up all that comes. 
It is always sufficient to do this ; and this is a na- 
tural, and I maintain against all objectors that this 
is a blessed work — a merciful work — God's own 
good work, as shown in all the kingdoms of nature. 
When Christ says, '^ the worm never dies," it is not 
said of the individual worm in the decaying flesh of 
one dead body, and far less is it said, that the de- 
caying flesh of any one sinner never dies ; but, what 
any Southern m.an well knows, certainly one who 
comes from a State where they put a fine on the 
shooting of a vulture, the race never fails ; it is al- 
ways sufficient for any amount of work. In other 
words, granting the law of selection, for the mo- 
ment, the two meanings of the language of Jesus 
naturally lie between the assertion of the endur- 
ing sufficiency of the powers of destruction to re- 
move everything that offends, and the unnatural 
and monstrous transfer of the notion of perpetu- 
ated life to the dead and corrupting masses of filth, 
which the fire and the worm are set to remove. 

But, says one, " the soul is immortal, and hence 
the suffering is eternal.'' I answer, that is phi- 
losophy,*^ and not scriptural interpretation. It 

* Two words are used in the New Testament which are translated 
hiunortality : dQaradlaf iin-dyiiigncss (used three times : i Cor. xv. 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, ny 

is arbitrary logic applied to poetry. It is a car- 
penter's foot-rule used to measure the spiritual 
kingdom of God. If Christ anywhere says: ^ the 
souls of men are subjected perpetually to fires 
that burn souls, and to worms that feed on 
thoughts and gnaw on consciences/ then I will 
hold to his dictum, and bow my mind to myste- 
ries of horror which have no solution in human 
thought or in nature. For I have said already, 
that I will go to the utmost extent of his words, and 
no farther. It has been my aim to clear away all 

53, 54, and i Tim. vi. 16); and acpOapdia, incori'tiptibleiiess 
(used eight times : Rom. ii. 7 ; i Cor. xv. 42, 50, 53, 54 ; Eph. vi. 24 ; 
2 Tim. i. 10 ; Titus, ii. 7 ; or used six times for the divine communi- 
cation of undyingness to the bodies of the saints alone, as opposed 
to a natural, corrupted condition — and twice in an indirect mean- 
ing iox sincerity). In the whole English Bible the word immortality 
occurs but five times (Rom. ii. 7 ; i Cor. xv. 53, 54; i Tim. vi. 16 ; 
2 Tim. i. 10). In all these cases the language applies to the righteous 
only, and exclusively to them, save in that one remarkable assertion 
of St. Paul, that God "only hath immortality," of his own right. 
// is not used of the lost. It cannot be so used. Now, i. I am 
aware of the force of the corresponding word " eternal life," and, 
2. I am not disposed just here to moot the question of the resur- 
rection or the immortality of the lost, but I state these facts of 
revelation, as justifying me in the assertion that the objection cited 
is made by philosophy against revelation ; or rather perhaps by 
philosophy assuming the high probability of such immortality of 
the lost (as to their souls alone, not of their bodies — of which phi- 
losophy knows nothing) and imposing a meaning against the ordi- 
nary working of nature on the text of Scripture. '' Unde resurrec- 
tio simpliciter loquendo, est miracnlosa non nattiralis nisi secundum 
quid, utexdictispatet." — AquijiaSyVdiW 3d, quest. 76, vol. iv., p. 1273. 



Il8 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

Side issues from this one point, for it is the one 
critical point of all others. If any one conscien- 
tiously can see no way to escape from this transfer 
of the everlastingness from the fire to the subject, 
I cannot say him nay. I am in the valley of the 
shadow. I decline however myself to make the 
transfer while there is any intelligent method of 
avoiding it. 

But in this thing we have long enough followed 
the dogmas of Augustine and Calvin, and the sub- 
lime classics of Dante and Milton, as infallible. 
It is time to go back to the words of Christ and 
clarify them of all later additions. He has to my 
mind asserted the sufificiency of the causes of 
death to remove all that is corrupted and all that 
offends. In the sense of 'Ooi'dX power it is all-endur- 
ing. The race of the worms will not die out, the 
fires of essential purification will not be quenched 
while the world lasts. The air that moves up 
from the gloomy vale of Gehenna will always rise 
pure and sweet to the children of God. Yea, '^ the 
earth also and the works that are therein shall be 
burned up^^ Why? That ^'new heavens and a 
new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,'* may 
appear, as the solution of every enigma. 

I pass this just here, for the present. I have 



* 2 Pet. iii. lo, HazaHaiGO. 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, uq 

shown, that in this place of Jude's epistle, which 
is often used to assert the endless supernatural- 
ness of fire, whether material or spiritual, to keep 
alive souls or bodies, it is plain that he is not so 
to be taken. I pass to one or two passages where 
the same use of the word eternal is made by other 
apostles. In Romans, ch. xvi. 25, St. Paul has 
these words : " the mystery, which was before the 
world began.'' We open the Greek Testament, 
and it is there — XP^'^^^^ aicorioi^ (recTiyr/juirov. It 
is ^^ the mystery kept silent /or or through eternal 
times." You will notice that the translators did 
not give it literally. They could not do it and 
make sense of it in English, for there is no such 
thing as eternal times. It means just what they 
say — before the world began. It is only a general 
phrase to tell us, that the doctrine in question 
had never been revealed to mankind. But some 
one suggests, ' it has been kept silent for all past 
eternity, and so it may mean in other c^&es, all 
future eternity.' So then take a case where this 
idea is cut off. In 2 Tim. i. 9, he speaks of the 
grace given to us in Christ Jesus — npo XP^'^^^ 
aic^ric^v — or before eternal times. We should then 
be obliged to believe of the apostle, that, in his 
way of using this word, there was a limit in the 
past, and a time before eternity ; which would be 



120 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

impossible and nonsensical. The apostle, it is 
sufficient to say, did not use English, and did 
speak sense^ so that the translators properly gave 
it to us as — before the world began. Thus we come 
to the rule in regard to this word, that it is not 
philosophical, but of common use, and that it is 
always to be understood by the nature of the 
cases in which it occurs. In Heb. vi. 2, he 
ranks the doctrine of the eternal judgmeiit^ among 
the credenda of the catechism. God has appoint- 
ed a day in which to judge the world. For one I 
hope that he will keep us all to the appointment. 
We may all say devoutly with David, '^ Let us fall 
now into the hand of the Lord, for his mercies are 
great : and let me not fall into the hand of man.'' 
I cannot begin to comprehend the history of man 
or the records of my own conscience, without 
such a final readjustment and immense universal 
compensation. From graves of myriads of fail- 
ures and lost lives, of infants, cripples, and idiots, 
and of insane persons, from Smithfields and St. 
Bartholomew's, from the Roman amphitheaters, 
soaked with blood, from land and sea, from souls 
under the Altar and from souls which never saw 
an altar, from souls of Calibans hag-engendered 
and borne to earth in the midst of crudest discour- 
agements and basest animalism, with hardly a 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 121 

chance of virtue and decency, and from souls that 
have imitated the lost archangels and rushed 
down from the pinnacles of every social and moral 
advantage, whose very despair has put on the 
sublime of a late repentance, there comes that 
cry of St. John, '' Lord, how long? " '' The Spirit 
and the Bride say, Come : yea, come. Lord 
Jesus/' I now see Jesus the rider on the white 
horse, the immaculate Chevalier of the Church, 
borne down in the fight. I see vice triumphing 
and virtue peeping and tremulous. I look to see 
the end, when he shall emerge from the dust and 
noise of the world-battle at last triumphant, with 
his name written on his thigh and on his dinted 
helm — King of kings, and Lord of lords — when 
with softest songs of epithalamium, the Bride 
washed from every stain shall summon her maids 
to meet him in the sky, and all creation shall 
raise the cry of the Apocalyptic vision, "- The 
marriage of the Lamb has come." " And after these 
things,'' said St. John, ** I heard a great voice of 
much people in heaven, saying, Alleluia : salva- 
tion, and honor, and power unto the Lord our 
God : for true and righteous are his judgments : 
For he hath judged the great Harlot, which did 
corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath 
avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. 
6 



122 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 

And again they said, Alleluia. And her smoke as- 
cended up forever and ever." I look to see it ascend 
till the last corrupt thing that offends by its utter 
evil and baseness, its foulness and malarial stench, 
its failure and rottenness, its plague and curse, is 
burned thoroughly up, as honest fire always does 
burn thoroughly up. When Christ in the splen- 
did picturing of his last public discourse is seen 
sending the goats into *' everlasting fire," I accept 
the^r^ itself as sufficient, as final, and in that sense 
enduring or eternal. But who shall by his added 
logic begotten of pagan horror and superstitious 
science, transfer the everlastingness to the goats ? 
or who on the other hand shall dare say, that it 
is not transferred? We can only stand in our little 
Zoar if we find one, and look back on the scene 
of destruction and wonder. It is the world-old 
doubt. It is '' the background of mystery." In old 
times when men ignorantly believed in animals 
always existing horribly in the hottest fires : 
when they superstitiously explained volcanoes as 
the fiery prisons of Jove, who with terrible ven- 
geance kept his enemies confined in them — it was 
natural to look beyond the first idea of burning, 
and fill the fancy with unnatural horrors of perpetu- 
ated mystery. We do not have their excuse. Can 
we not stand still, and listen to the words of 



DOCTRINE OF THE NE W TESTAMENT. 



123 



Christ, and stay our roving theories just where 
he leaves us ? And then, for what is beyond, in 
the far blue depths of eternity, God help me to 
accept what may be there, when I can better un- 
derstand what eternity means, to him or for me. 

The Bible has use for a word that has in it this 
double-sidedness. It is for us to say whether we 
shall be forced, against the best instincts of the 
heart, against the thought and knowledge of a world, 
to confuse them. '*The eternal power and God- 
head," who would ask for a limit to the thought? 
But the eternal judgment, the eternal condemna- 
tion, the everlasting punishment may well be left 
in the shadow of the word which Scripture has pro- 
vided. It is final. It is sufficient. It covers the 
times of revelation, from that old date, when the 
morning stars sang together, till that last hour 
when the Bright and Morning Star shall step out 
in the blue depths of a limitless future, to tell us 
that evil is ended, forever, and as the old Latin 
words have it, the hymn of glory shall roll on, in 
sceaila scecitlorum. 

Let me add one word, as to the poetical usage 
of the last book of the Bible. I have made no al- 
lusion to it as an argument ; only, by way of il- 
lustration. I say, in brief, that I regard that book 
as a poem, with one great design : namely, to 



124 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 

paint to the imaginations of the first Christians, 
during the age of pagan persecution, the pictures 
of spiritual facts which should tell them better 
than prosaic words could do, all the powers which 
were then at war for their souls. I consider it to 
have ended, as to its definite prophecies, when 
pagan Rome fell ; it reaches upward in its yearn- 
ings of inspired fancy to the day of judgment ; it 
has very little fitness for this controversy. To use 
it dogmatically, in order to decide the prose facts 
of this doctrine, would be a great mistake. It 
would be like taking the splendid dreams of Mil- 
ton, to settle a law-case of the common courts, 
or to describe the track of a comet. If the ordi- 
nary Augustinian dogma is true, then, we may ex- 
pect to find the book of Revelation in harmony 
with it. If the ideas which I have offered you are 
true, the music of the epic of St. John will not 
contradict them. But the ideas must be first 
treated alone and ascertained, before the music is 
called in, to glorify them. When we wonder what 
Christ meant in the description of the last judg- 
ment, we turn to the scenery of St. John's visions 
for comparison and illustration. In the last chap- 
ters of the Apocalypse, we have the grand scene 
of the final triumph of Christ. The White Throne 
and its august Company appear to the mind's eye ; 



DOCTRIXE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 125 

the Books are opened ; the sentence that tells the 
end of evil forever to us is given. The Beasts and 
the False Prophet, the old Babylonian civilization 
and idolatry, are cast alive into a Lake of Fire 
burning with brimstone, and they perish. They 
certainly are burned up at once and -finally, they do 
not in the wildest imagination continue to suffer 
in brimstone and volcanic flames to an endless 
eternity, but they perish utterly and at once. All 
men are then being judged according to their 
works. Then, two monster forms darken the 
vision for a moment, each a formidable shape, 
each black as night, fierce as ten furies, terrible 
as hell ; ^' and death and hell [two living monsters, 
two great macrocosms of human horror] were cast 
into the lake of fire. This is the second death. 
And whosoever was not found written in the 
Book of Life was cast into the Lake of Fire." 
This act of the Eternal Judgment closes the story 
of evil. If we take it as prose, may I ask. If 
Death and Hell are real beings, and if they suffer 
forever? Or if they are not rather imaginations 
of the sublimer kind, and perish then by the fire ? 
If so, why should the others, those not found 
written in the Book of Life, not perish too ? But 
we have no right to any such critical reasonings 
about it. It is not prose. The poet used it as a 



126 DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 

skillful musician rolls the thunder of a Bourdon 
double bass on the organ, not that the ear catches, 
or needs to catch, any exact vibration on the 
chromatic scale, but that it is thereby prepared 
for the strain which is to ensu.e. Thus, as this 
double CC passes away, the first notes of the 
endless song of the Lamb come floating in — the 
new City, and the new Earth, the Holy City — 
the Bride adorned for her husband, the City 
without temple, the Bride, without blemish — 
the Garden of the Lord, the River of Life, the 
auroral Light and beatific Vision taking the place 
of sun and moon ; no sin, no sorrow more, nothing, 
but ^^ sacred, high, eternal noon/' None that 
defile, or work abomination, or make a lie shall 
enter there. Where are they ? Let us go to the 
jeweled pavement, where to-day stands the mosque 
of Omar, and the Church of Justinian, and look off 
through the cloudless sky to the south. There 
Abraham once stood in the sublime act of self- 
sacrifice of his dearest desire, to see Christ's day 
and be glad — and with great black Oriental e}/es, 
looking to the far future, he will be there with us, 
to asl< again, '' Shall not the Jiidge of all the earth 
do right?'' Moses has now crossed the Jordan, 
and he, who once saw even the terrors and dark- 
ness of Sinai, all glorious within, with God's good- 



DOCTRINE OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, 



127 



ness and mercy, will stand there with us then. All 
the redeemed who have saved their souls and be- 
come God-like and Christ-like by infinite pity and 
love unconquerable, will be by our side. Look off 
then, and see where the thin line of smoke rose 
yonder in the day of Christ, through the clear 
air, and if it is there still, ask it what it means. It 
answers me, ^* There is an allotted end of evil. Only 
God is eternal. Only good shall be everlasting,'' It 
tells me, that every power that can touch my con- 
science has been used by Christ, to prove to me, 
that the good is best — the true is wisest : — that his 
judgments are everlasting, because they are just. 
There shall be no more curse ; there shall be no 
more night ; must we say, there shall still be evil ? 
Are we compelled to say that sin must be eternal, 
that agonies untold are necessary to the goodness 
of God forever and ever ? 

"While sin remains, and souls in darkness dwell, 
Can heaven itself be heaven, and look unmoved on hell? " 

If SO, if we must change our higher thoughts of 
God and Christ — if, driven on by a remorseless, 
arbitrary logic, we must accept other thoughts, who 
can fault the poet's prayer, or fail to make it his 
own? 

'' My God, my God ! if thither led, 
By thy free grace unmerited, 
No crown nor palm be mine, but let me keep 
A heart that still can feel, and eyes that still can weep." 



VII. 
THE USE OF THE PRAYER BOOK.* 

2 Corinthians, v. io-ii. — For we must all appear before the 
judgment- seat of Christ ; that every one may receive the things 
done in the body, according as he hath done, whether it be good 
or bad. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade 
men. 

^ I ^HIS text illustrates one feature of the subject 
-^ of future punishment, which must not be 
disregarded, which is, the manner in which each 
one uses it. Granting for the moment, that the 
severest view is the true one, the question of how 
a preacher of the Gospel or how a Church is to 
present it and deal with it, is the question of most 
importance. It is not to be allowed for a moment, 
that Christ would have revealed such a future con- 
dition to men, and have given them no sufficient 
indications as to its treatment. Present to two 
men of differing tempers the substance of this 
doctrine, and one of them will cause the Gospel to 
smoke with pitchy eloquence ; the other will, on 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, March lo, 1878. 

128 



THE USE OF THE PR A YER BOOK, 



129 



the whole, come up to the force of the words, bjat 
will do it reluctantly, will always stand far inside 
of the line of severity, and always lean to the side 
of mercy. In the very form of the translation of 
this text, we have an illustration of this inclination 
to better the expression of the Gospel. The word 
which is here rendered terror^ with its verb and 
adjective, occurs in the New Testament one hun- 
dred and forty times. It is always translated /^^r 
or reverence^ except in three places. In one of 
these instances, the translator uses the word terror 
only for the sake of euphony, as: Be not afraid of 
their terror,^ Again, the English spirit of rather 
excessive loyalty tempted him to put it in : Rulers 
are not a terror to good works : f and here the 
Calvinistic leaven comes to the surface, knowing 
the terror of the Lord, It is plain that he de- 
sired to add a darker shade to the softer word of 
the Apostle. St. Paul said, Knowing the fear of 
the Lord. He did not say terror, and there is 
nothing in the verse to indicate anything of ter- 
ror. Fear is a healthy sentiment of the heart ; 
terror is the morbid condition, the excess of the 
emotion. Fear is religious. Terror is supersti- 
tious. But it was perfectly natural for that learned 
Calvinistic divine of the age of James I. to use 

♦ "^ I Pet. iii. 14. f Rom. xiii. 3. 

6* 



130 THE USE OE THE PEA YER BOOK, 

the harsher instead of the milder word, as it is 
perfectly natural now for such men to miss the 
point of the text, and thinking that they are right, 
to claim to know the terror of the Lord, and 
therefore terrify men^ instead of persuade them^, 
after the wholesome manner of truth. I can com- 
prehend how St. Paul, knowing the fear of Christ, 
as the one man, who in the form of man is to be 
the last judge of all men, would persuade us by 
human argument, and in so doing, could say, that 
his heart was laid open or ^^ manifest *' before God, 
in the sincerity of his motives, and he hoped, also, 
laid open to the consciences and understandings 
of his fellow Christians of Corinth. But I cannot 
understand any consistency in his style, if he is 
supposed to be justifying the terror which some 
force into his words. Emphatically we are all to 
stand before the judgment -seat of Christ. He 
will come to restore all things as the Son of Man, 
i, e.y as a man. The entire poetry of the various 
descriptions of the last judgment depend on this 
representation of the human nature^ as the circle 
that contains the motives, the tests, and the sen- 
tences of that last scene of trial and judgment. 
If this is so, then I resist with my whole soul, any 
dogmas of infinite and inconceivable mysteries, 
being the rule of that judgment ; dogmas that 



THE USE OF THE PRAYER BOOK. 131 

defy all attempts of human comprehension as to 
any portion of them. I do not question the di- 
vinity of Christ. I do not pretend to ignore the 
awful possibilities which lie beyond the sentences. 
I only resist the stupidity which tells me in one 
moment to praise God that a Son of woman is to 
judge me, and in the next breath commands me 
to be silent when I ask, '' Shall not the judge 
of all the earth, shall not the Son of Mary do 
right ? " And if so, must I not now interpret all 
the metaphors of the subject on some comprehen- 
sible theory of human justice? Dogma is seeking 
now with all its usual arts to evade this issue. 
But it will fail. It is one of those issues into 
which the world drifts at times, and when once 
fairly made, the end of it is certain. The doctrine 
of eternal punishment, as it lies in the lap of the 
Man who so loved the whole world as to give his 
life in order to let all human ideas of tenderness 
and mercy run limping far behind him, is a dogma, 
whereby, if we get at it rightly, we are to persuade 
men on cognizable grounds and motives, not 
merely terrify them. There are these two ways of 
dealing with the scriptural thought of the Last 
Judgment of Christ, which I hold to be somehow 
comprehensibly y^/i-/, at least: which I hold to be, 
that punishment, in the end of the world, will 



132 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 



have some sort of relation to the best and truest 
ideas and examples of the punishments that now 
exist ; that the justice of the Christ then, will be 
the same as that he has always illustrated here, 
not in natural law only, but specially in this hu- 
man life. But, my purpose is to-day, to show you 
just how this method of treatment is illustrated in 
the prayer book of this Church. I do not hold 
the prayer book to be in any way infallible. Nor 
do I pretend always to confine my ideas of 
truth to its dictates. No living man does. I 
shall claim for it, in this discussion, only the 
authority of a venerable document, which is for 
us the ordinary guide to sound opinions and 
pious impulses and affections in doubtful mat- 
ters. It is our book of sailing-directions, in the 
voyage of time. Like any almanac or ephemeris, 
it is full of ancient characters, and some old and 
obsolete shadowings of things which we love in 
their place, and keep as the marks of its great age. 
But the Christian man is always bound to remem- 
ber that he has no Master nor Rabbi on the earth 
when his conscience pulls him with the leverage of 
a hair. Reverence for precedents must always yield 
to conviction. .He is then thrown back on his own 
conscience and on the illumination of a diviner 
Spirit in his own conscience, by the very com- 



THE USE OF THE PR A YER BOOK, 



133 



mands of his heavenly Master, Christ. I shall be 
a little tedious here, but I choose to have you see 
for yourselves how small, and yet how important a 
place this subject has in the liturgy. And to do 
this I must quote the passages in which it occurs : 

I. The Litany, " From thy wrath and from ever- 
lasting damnation, good Lord deliver us.'' I only 
ask you to lift the vulgar meaning off from the 
word damnation ; and I insist that it means, 
simply, condemnation - or judgment, i, ^., the act, 
not the consequences. That, of course, may be in 
fact all that the other word means, but it did not 
carr}^ the now vulgar force of it, when it was put into 
this prayer. Whatever the Bible means by the 
word, of course the Litany means the same, but it 
does not add to it. 

n. In the first Sunday in Advent, and the 
fourth Sunday after Trinity w^e have a passing 
allusion to the Judgment, praying that *^ we may 
rise to the life immortal," and that *Sve lose not 
the things eternal,*' and nowhere else in the public 
liturgy is it mentioned. Note the fact, for this 

* " And Dr. Hammond observes of the Greek xpiincx, that ac- 
cording to its origination, it signifies ce\\?,\\xty Judgment; and in its 
making hath no intimation either of the quality of the offence to 
which the judgment belongs, or to the judge who inflicts it. He 
might have added, or of the punishment inflicted." — Richardson s 
Lexicon. 



1 34 THE USE OF THE PR A YER BOOK, 

silence is emphatic. Pass outside the Church and 
listen to the prayers and exhortations of popular 
preachers, anywhere, and you have at a glance two 
separate vie^vs of how the same subject is capable 
of being used. This Church certainly framed her 
liturgy on the idea that she inherits a blessing, 
not a curse — that she is to educate men to believe 
in good, and not evil. The latter they learn of 
themselves. 

III. The Catechism tells the children of the 
Church what they are to believe in regard to the 
morals of life. It finds in the Lord's Prayer for 
their instruction, in the phrase. Deliver us from 
evil, that God will '' keep us from all sin and 
w^ickedness, and from our spiritual enemy, and 
from everlasting death.'* Whatever evil signifies 
in the prayer, it signifies in the comment. Everlast- 
ing death is surely contained in it, but it goes no 
whit farther, it stops just there ; it does not say 
*^ everlasting agony, or endless torment." 

IV. Let us hear the words which rise out of the 
homes of her children at their family prayers: 
^^ Imprint upon our hearts such a dread of thy 
judgments, and such a grateful sense of thy good- 
ness to us, as may make us both afraid and 
ashamed to offend thee." Let our '' consciences 
be void of offense toward thee and toward men, 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 



135 



that we may be preserved pure and blameless, unto 
the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ/* I claim that 
this is a healthy fear of the Lord that has healing 
in it, and which persuades us and our children to 
gentler thoughts of Christ. It teaches a decent 
silence. If perchance one has left our home- 
circle '' whose title clear *' we are not quite able to 
read, it soothes rather than corrodes the wound. 

V. Let us follow the pastor of a parish to the 
private scenes of trouble, among sick and guilty 
people, where the thought of the future must 
come up and must be directly treated. The 
Visitation office for the Sick is most emphatically 
an office for the consolation of the weak. In every 
word of it, it implies that fear of the Lord by 
which we persuade men. In the prayer for those 
troubled in mind or in conscience about their sins, 
its language is exactly suited to the highest dictates 
of my reason on this whole subject, as having that 
sacred silence and half-shadow of which I have 
spoken. On the bed of sickness lies the penitent 
man who is writhing with this great fear, that 
bitter things are written against him in the book 
of remembrance. He is made to possess his former 
iniquities. A sense of wrath lies hard upon him, 
and his soul is full of trouble. Here then is the 
sensitive nerve laid bare to the eye of the pastor, 



136 THE USE OF THE PRAYER BOOK, 

and this is the oil which the Church pours in : 
^^ O merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word 
for our learning, that we, through the patience 
and comfort of thy holy Scriptures, might have 
hope ; give him a right understanding of himself, 
and of thy threats and promises, that he may 
neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place 
it anywhere but in thee. Break not the bruised 
reed nor quench the smoking flax.'* 

VI. The strongest language which is used any- 
where in these sacred offices of the Church is 
found in the exhortation to those who are con- 
demned to die. It goes to the length of the 
words of Christ. At first sight it seems to settle the 
meaning of that language in one way ; it quotes 
as a solemn warning the text : ** Go ye accursed 
into the fire everlasting,'* and terms it ^^ a dreadful 
sentence." Later on it calls it " an endless and 
ttnchangeable stated But note carefully here : the 
tenderness and hopefulness which prevail in it 
all. The minister standing as it were under the 
gallows, and often standing really there, with one 
whose sins are as scarlet, is not set there, but to 
proclaim mercy and hope to all men, and to touch 
on the theme of God's wrath, but in passing, as he 
proclaims his pardoning love. The criminal who 
has been condemned at the bar of man's judg- 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 137 

ment is exhorted in the same words as the sick 
member of the church, gave that the guilt of his 
crime is taken for granted, and the lower note 
of that terrible day is struck, as it should be, to 
teach him repentance. 

VII. In the office of the Ordering of Priests, 
the bishop warns the candidates to remember 
the greatness of the fault and the horrible punish' 
ment which will ensue on their unfaithfulness to 
the spouse and body of Christ. The language 
here is too general to come into the argument. 
The same remark may be made concerning the 
words in the Order for the Burial of the Dead, 
'* deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal 
death." 

VIII. Let us now dwell somewhat on the com- 
mon usages of the Church in the last rite of all, 
the burial service ; when the man has now passed 
beyond the reach of human help. To see the 
point which I would make more clearly, we may 
take the burial service of the English Church, and 
then see the temper of the compilers of the Amer- 
ican prayer-book in their changes of the language. 
By the law of England, and by the usage of our 
Church, this service is to be used over every bap- 
tized Christian without distinction, and the min- 
ister is not allowed to make his own opinion of 



138 THE USE OF THE PR A YER BOOK. 

the party the cause of exception, unless the per- 
son has died under the ban of excommunication, 
or has committed suicide. Practically, these two 
exceptions have vanished from the scene. For 
the excommunication by the Church is obsolete, 
as a fact, and the verdict of any jury, that the 
suicide has been produced by any form of mo- 
mentary insanity, nullifies the rubric. Practical- 
ly, as you know, the service is now hardly ever 
refused to any man. It is sometimes avoided 
by the minister's taking his prayers from other 
sources. So that as a matter of fact, the burial 
service is used almost without exception, by the 
ministers of the Episcopal Church, over saints and 
sinners. The English prayer book, in the act of 
committal directs the minister to say, " Foras- 
much as it has pleased Almighty God of his great 
mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear 
brother,'' etc. By right of his baptism he reads 
over him the words, *^ Blessed *are the dead, who 
die in thci Lord." In the prayers he gives hearty 
thanks for all, as for ^/ our brother delivered out 
of the miseries of this sinful world," and prays in 
the same breath for the filling up of the number 
of the elect. And again, it implies the common 
yearning of the kindly heart, that *^ this our bro- 
ther doth rest in hope, and that we may rest with 



THE USE OF THE PRAYER BOOK. 135 

him, and at last be found acceptable in God's 
sight/' Now this pointed mode of expressing 
this charitable hope, has been somewhat changed 
in our prayer book. I remind you, that it has 
been done under the almost covenant declaration 
of the compilers of it, that ^^ this Church is far 
from intending to depart from the Church of 
England in any essential point of doctrine, disci- 
pline, or worship ; or further than local circum- 
stances require/' Whatever there is in the lan- 
guage which I have quoted, which can be inter- 
preted as essential to either doctrine, discipline, or 
Avorship, that is certainly the doctrine, discipline, 
or worship of this Church."^ Essentially we are 
committed to all important ideas of both books. 
Passing by all other things which may be found 
in the service, I maintain that we are committed 
to this one thought : that this Church refuses, in 
her religious rites, to anticipate in any way the 
final judgment of any man, who is in this Christian 

* Of course the ideas have changed since the actual woi'ds are 
omitted, and have changed for the worse. The older service was 
constantly a protest against a shallow, meager, and false Protest- 
antism. It testified to an intermediate state, in which all men 
baptized into the Church remain till the day of judgment. It for- 
bade all presumption as to the conditions of individual souls. It 
was inconsistent with sectarian dogmatics. The silences of the 
present service are to be deplored, as allowing other inferences to 
be made by us. 



I40 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 



Brotherhood, and who does not by his own act, 
or by his enormous guilt, and by ecclesiastical 
adjudication, put himself out of it. But it is cer- 
tain, that the Church as a field or net contains all 
who are to stand before the judgment-seat of 
Christ ; the wheat and the tares, the good fish and 
the bad ; as parts of that one flock which is poeti- 
cally described as either sheep or goats. I — and I 
suppose every minister of this Church has done it 
— I have used the burial service over the mortal 
remains of every sort and grade of character ; 
over Pharisee and publican, spotless women and 
spotted harlots, saints and sinners ; and will con- 
tinue to do so to the end of my public service. 

This then is the actual language and usage of 
the Book of Common Prayer. There is one other 
fact about it to be considered, before I am at 
liberty to draw any inferences from it, and that 
is the doctrinal record of the Church. ' In the 
Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, as they stand, 
there is nothing whatever said of this dogma of 
future punishment. But in the original Forty-two 
Articles, the last one had this section : " Thei are 
worthie of condemnatione [Latin, damnatione\ who 
indevoure at this time to restore the dangerouse 
opinion, that al menne, be thei never so ungodlie, 
shall at length bee saved, when thei have suffered 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK, 



141 



paines for their sinnes a certaine time appoincted 
by Goddes justice/' The Forty-two Articles were 
issued in 1552, apparently by the King's Coun- 
cil — not by the bishops and clergy. This one 
was pointed at the Anabaptists of the reign 
of Edward VI., and was taken from the Augs- 
burgh Confession. It was omitted at the next 
revision of 1562, and has never been re-enacted. 
The only argument that I propose to draw from 
the fact is, that the Church, when she had time to 
reflect calmly on the subject, deliberately chose to 
say nothing about it. I think it probable that 
the Church of England, or our own Episcopal 
Church, if called on now to make any assertion, 
would be found on the side of the Article as 
it was. If I hesitated to subscribe it, it would 
be only that I know not, for certain, all that 
one should know to make it an Article of author- 
ity. The Privy Council of England, a few years 
ago, in the course of an ecclesiastical trial, had 
this subject before them, and gave it their care- 
ful attention. The decision was : ^^ We do not 
find in the formularies any such distinct decla- 
ration of our Church upon the subject, as to re- 
quire us to condemn as penal, the expression of 
hope by a clergyman, that even the ultimate 
pardon of the wicked, who are condemned in the 



142 THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 

day of judgment, may be consistent with the 
^^ will of Almighty God/' * The two Archbishops of 
York and Canterbury united in this part of the 
opinion. This coincides entirely with my propo- 
sition of the intentional silence which this Church 
has maintained on this whole matter. This silence 
is as positive a fact as anything about her. It is 
the witness of the manner in which she treats the 
dogma ; and of the spirit in which she would have 
her preachers treat it. 

I can now give you my inferences, from all 
these facts of the liturgic usage. Take them, I 
pray you, only as my inferences. The next man 
whom you listen to, may infer just the contrary. 
They stand on no authority but that of fact and 
verisimilitude. 

I. The prayer book has no theory about HelL It 
uses the word only to tell us that Christ went there ; 
that is, ^^ to the place of departed spirits." It pro- 
pounds nothing about future punishment, beyond 
the use of certain scriptural language. If you are 
satisfied of the meaning of the scriptural words, 
then to you, of course, those words in the prayer 
book signify just what they do in the older book. 
I am free to allow that the majority of the clergy 
of the Church have adopted the harsher views, 

^ See Six Privy Council Judgments, p. I02. 



THE USE OF TiTe PRA YER BOOK. 143 

which have prevailed in all sects of the Church, 
since the days of Augustine ; and that such views 
are held by the majority of the popular sects of to- 
day. With many persons that sort of unthinking, 
general consent decides most matters. I am so 
constituted and have been so trained, that it can- 
not decide them for me. All truth must at some 
stage of it assert itself. If truth lives, it can do so. 
If it cannot do it, then it is so far dead. My mind 
rises up in hopeless resistancy, at any mere au- 
thority, until the arguments for it are sustained 
by so much evidence as the case allows. For 
good or ill, I hear Christ saying to me, ^^ Call no 
man Rabbi, on the earth." Passing then all other 
questions about those words, he surely tells me, 
that he is willing to trust his Gospel to the higher 
reason of his children. The half-shadow, that his 
Word and his Church have left on the details of 
the last judgment and on its issues, appeals to the 
best sense that I am possessed of. I am not 
sorry, that the authorities of Edward VI. should 
have yielded to the pressure of 1552, and inserted 
a passage as to the details of the last judgment, 
for it gave the divines of Elizabeth the opportu- 
nity to erase it promptly and exhibit the truer in- 
stinct. Every sort of influence has since been 
brought to bear on the Church, to force her to de- 



144 



THE USE OF THE PR A YER BOOK, 



part from this moderation and silence, and failed. 
It is her glory, or it is her shame, according as you 
look at it. 

II. No one can examine the citations which I 
have offered and not be convinced, that the book 
is on the side of the finality, the thoroughness, 
and the sufficiency of the justice of God. The 
Church is womanly, rather than masculine. She 
has the feminine trait, to exert all the ingenuity 
that a maternal instinct and a sister's tact can use, 
to find out how to lean always to the side of 
mercy. The prayer book is to many men a stum- 
bling-block, because of the two elements in it ; one 
of the masculinities of monks and lean divines, 
who had been better often as monks ; the other 
of the softer elements of that charity that drop- 
peth like the gentle dew from heaven, and which 
asserts its own claims, by its being at all. Given 
the intellect in excess, and the Articles will suffice 
to build up again some of the dogmatic palaces 
or fortresses, in which men have reveled or fought 
in old times. They will suffice, too, for the Mil- 
tonic substructures, where the doors on their hor- 
rid hinges ^^ grate harsh thujtdery On the other 
hand, given, what I shall call a full-blooded and 
rich-hearted humanity, and the liturgic portions of 
the service will fascinate the mind, and will repu- 



THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 



145 



diate with more or less aversion, the other me- 
thods. Which is best ? Which will prevail in the 
end ? The book leaves it to the end to reply. 

III. The use of the burial service tests for us 
certain things in this whole matter. The test is a 
, severe one. In the last thirty years of ministry, 
I have heard one single man, a Methodist minister, 
tell the assembly of friends at a funeral, that while 
he was preaching to them, the person, for whom 
they had been called together, was in the midst 
of hell-torments. He enlarged on it with fright- 
ful plainness, and logically proved his points from 
his premises. I felt then, despite of the horror of 
it, and I feel now, that on their common premises, 
he was doing what ought to be done. Gehenna 
in Scripture lies altogether on the other side of the 
day of judgment. But men kindle its flames at 
death, and define its chief details as now existing. 
What is it then that prevents preachers universally 
from the bluntness of the Methodist, that I heard ? 
or again, what is the drift of communities, that 
hold to these details, and hesitate at the legitimate 
conclusions from them ? During my ministry I 
have heard more sneers at the common funeral 
discourses of the age, than at all other Christian 
matters put together. Every one of you has heard 
them, yea, and probably sympathized with them. 
7 



146 THE USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 

It explains the growing distaste in the communi- 
ty for any words, at a funeral, except the burial 
service. Yea, it is that thing in the burial service, 
that is felt to be desirable, by all classes of the 
community. Take an illustration. Imagine, that 
I could convince any family here in this assembly, 
the next time we meet around the coffin of a 
young girl, that she has been taken to the volcano 
Kilauea, and submerged a thousand fathoms deep 
in the eight-mile caldron there of liquid lava, 
and subjected to the foul, obscene embraces and 
insults, and the tearing talons of the vilest fiends, 
day and night, in horrors inconceivable, while 
Christ w^as all the time looking on and smiling 
down from the crater's top in divinest satisfaction ; 
while gentle angels were passing between your in- 
fants of election and that pit's mouth, and waking 
in you the sanctities of perfectest tenderness ; tun- 
ing their voices over it to a higher song of praise 
to the King of kings, who proposes to make his 
royal title known, in telling and convincing us how 
tender of his creatures the great God is. Why 
not? Why! I confess, that I enjoyed a throb of 
new love toward God, when I read in Living- 
stone's travels, how under the paw of a lion, about 
to kill him, he suddenly discovered a new law of 
death ; discovered, that a dazing of the whole ner- 



THE USE OF THE ERA YER BOOK, 



147 



vous life in his body, like a mental anaesthetic, oc- 
curred, and he looked up to the savage beast over 
him, with pleased and satined serenity. I tell 
you, that the world has drifted out of our control, 
in this old Dante picturing, and that however we 
may lament the necessity, we must surrender the 
machinery, which has been built up around this 
subject. Believing as I have always done, that 
both final states of men are left till after the re- 
surrection, and that God does not play the part 
of sending either saints or sinners to their fates, in 
order to bring them back again and enact an im- 
probable scene of appearing only to judge them, I 
can, and I choose to read this burial service in trust 
that he will do justice then, as I know that he 
always does it now. No amount of monkish in- 
terpretation or of Calvinistic logic can incline us 
to really believe, that he will judge us at the last, 
by any other rule of justice, than that which he 
has used in judging us, and commended to us, 
here and now. Let us trust him for that day, and 
leave this matter in the half-shadow, w^here reli- 
gion and nature, where revelation no less than 
science properly leave it. The last- punishment 
will be final, thorough, and sufficient. The rest 
will be, as all other things in the mind of Christ 
have already shown themselves to be, conceived 



148 ^^^^ USE OF THE PRA YER BOOK. 

and finished in a mercy, that transcends our high- 
est dreams. For one, I am compelled to give in 
my sympathy for all that prompts men to 

*' trust that good will fall 
At. last — far off — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring. 

" So runs my dream : but what am I ? 
An infant crying in the night : 
An infant crying for the light : 
And with no language but a cry." 



VIII. 
THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE.* 

2 Peter, iii. 14.— -Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for 
such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, 
without spot and blameless. And account that the long-suffering 
of our Lord is salvation. 

"^ I ^HE '^ such things'" in this text, which Chris- 
-*- tians were supposed to be looking for, are 
specified by the writer. They were the last thiitgs. 
We have, in this passage, the Apostle St. Peter, 
proposing the proper subject to which I promised 
to call your attention, in this last discourse on the 
doctrine of future punishment, namely, its lever- 
age on the human heart, or in other words, its 
use as an element in the education of a religious 
conscience. I have refused to have any definite 
opinion on many of the propositions of the com- 
mon creed about the place and kind of punish- 
ment at the last. I have asserted my right, in 
this church, to hold these things in a half-shadow ; 
at the hither side of it, seeing the light go out, 

* Preached in the Church of the Holy Trinity, March 10, 1878. 

149 



ISO 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



in the words of Christ, and on the farther side, 
stating that I do not believe the words eternal 
and the Hke to be used in the Bible in the philoso- 
phical sense at all, and that I have no faculties by 
which to believe in the absolute eternity of evil. 
As far as philosophy, science, and the interpreta- 
tion of language about a future eternity are con- 
cerned, the whole question might be left entirely 
to the abstractions of the closet, and the medita- 
tions of the scholar. Its sensitive side is just now 
the tremulous fear, in the minds of common Chris- 
tians, lest we may lose some fulcrum by which 
we are required to move the sinners of the world 
to recognize the penal consequences of sin. I am 
therefore bound, as I look at it, to assert in plain 
terms, three things : 

I. That I believe, that the final punishment of 
the wicked is to be final, thorough, and sufficient. 
This I have been doing in all that I have said. 

II. That I refuse to have any opinion, or to ex- 
press any belief beyond the words of Christ, when 
regarded as belonging to the region of poetry, or if 
you like the word better, of parable, or of symbol- 
ical or representative teaching. I have said, that 
I hold the real revelation of this subject to be pro- 
perly confined to him alone ; and that the after 
writers have only commented on or enlarged on 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



151 



his expressions, according to the poetry, science, 
and philosophy of their age. 

III. I repeat, that I think the expressions of 
Christ were left in a half-shadow^ and that when 
stripped of the poetry, from which the Augustinian 
spirit deduces the system of the harsher sort, they 
amount simply to intimations of the thoroughness, 
the finality, and the sufificiency of the justice of 
God. I have reiterated this in rather strong lan- 
guage ; because, on the one side, the testimony of 
all nature teaches us a certain set of ideas of jus- 
tice, which in my judgment, the Scriptures appeal 
to, and in point of fact, must appeal to, without 
hesitation or reserve. Making the appeal, they 
are bound by it. We stand on the edge of the 
infinite dark, and look off into the blackness that 
no man hath penetrated, or can penetrate, and we 
hear the call of a Voice from beyond : '' If you 
would. know what God is, go to Christ alone, who 
finally revealed him.'* It will not do to halt here, 
and because, in our opinion, some moral results 
beyond the common expectation may possibly 
follow the exercise of the highest reason, to tie up 
our judgments at the car of any human device. 

Here many good Christians are disposed to raise 
the cry of poor Burns, 

** The fear of hell's the hangman's whip 
To hold the wretch in order.*' 



152 THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 

They are honestly afraid that we shall lose some 
real and necessary moral force and medicament 
out of the sacred pharmacy. I claim the like 
charity for the wretched. We must hold the 
wretch in order, if we can. In the fear of 
Christ and of his final judgment, we must in the 
exercise of a sound discretion, not only persuade 
men, but present to them the motives of perfect 
justice, as an attribute of the Son of Man, as 
those motives are created by either the teachings 
or the example of Christ. And to that duty of 
showing that I do not lose any force, which reason 
or Scripture gives us, I would now address my- 
self. 

The subject then to-day is simply this. Given 
two ideas of future punishment as possible, which 
will have the more force in the Christian faith for 
regulating the balance of the conscience ; not only 
for restraining in due limits the vicious and out- 
rageous, but also for making a believer tender, lov- 
ing, kind, long-suffering, like Christ, and so godlike, 
or godly, rising up to the sublimest heights of the 
love which casteth out fear : one^ the personal con- 
viction that every man whose title clear he cannot 
read, is in the endless hell, that Spurgeon preaches y^ 



* I select his teaching, as, on the whole, the most realistic, al- • 
though the coarsest. It has this single advantage over the other 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 153 

or the other, the half-shadow instinct, rather than 
opinion, that the Creator, the Jehovah, the Son of 
Mary, the Judge of all the earth, who is to judge 
pagan and Christian, Grebo and Spurgeon, the 
isolated scholar poring over his jots and tittles, in 
the loftiness of accurate Grecisms, and the flat- 
headed, low-browed, back-alley scrub and news- 
boy, and the dullest Topsy, by some general idea 
of self-evident justice, which asks no leave to be, 
of scholar or sinner, but asserts itself? 

Now you perceive that I am open apparently to 
the charge of changing the ground of the question. 
This last, you will say, is really how to balance 
the Christian conscience, not the sinner's. But it 
is exactly here that the difficulty and the con- 
fusion begin. The real method of restraining the 
bad is by elevating the good. Our Lord has in 
many ways given us this rule, as when he said to 
his disciples, **Ye are the light of the world.'' 
The light does not regulate things by its shadows, 
or by the dark dazzlings of the eye, but by its 
shining. The Bible is not the treasury of the 

and more frightful conceit of a supernatural and inconceivable 
spiritual fire, that it shocks us into a thorough appreciation of the 
real evil of the other system — the idea which it gives us of Christ, 
and of God as revealed by him. The real terror is at last not in 
the degree of pain in the subject who suffers, but in the thought of 
the Ruler who inflicts the suffering. 

7* 



154 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



police wisdom of the world. The Church is not 
the appointed "• terror to evil-doers," but the State. 
And when I try to get at the proposition of how 
to regulate the consciences of men by the powers 
of fear, I am puzzled to reconcile the general 
questions that start up in the path. Let us look 
at them apart. 

And, first, on the side of philosophy and fact. 
Does the fear of hell demonstrate to our reason its 
claims to be the true balance-wheel of our religion 
in the war of the passions and appetites ? ""^ I 

* The following testimony of the Rev. R. Suffield was offered at 
a meeting held in Zion College in 1873, and afterward committed 
to writing : 

" My extensive experience for twenty years as confessor to 
thousands, whilst apostolic missionary in most of the large towns 
of England, in many portions of Ireland, in part of Scotland, and 
also in France, is, that excepting instances I could count on my 
fingers, the dogma of hell,- though firmly believed in by English and 
Irish Roman Catholics, did no moral or spiritual good, but rather 
the reverse. It never affected the right persons ; it frightened, 
nay tortured, innocent young women and virtuous boys ; it drove 
men and women into superstitious practices, which all here would 
lament. It appealed to the lowest motives and the lowest charac- 
ters ; not, however, to deter them from vice, but to make them the 
willing subjects of sad and often puerile superstitions. // never 
(excepting in the ivorst cases) deten^ed f7'0Jn the commission of sin. 
It caused unceasing mental and moral difficulties, lowered the 
idea of God, and drove devout persons from the God of hell to 
Mary. When a Catholic, I on different occasions conferred on 
this subject with thoughtful friends among the clergy, who agreed 
with me in noticing and deploring the same results. From the 
fear of hell we never expected virtue or high motives, or a noble 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 155 

have quoted Robert Burns. He lived in the thick 
throng of Scotch Calvinists, the bravest, the most 
logical, the most unsparing and outspoken wit- 
nesses to this dogma that the world has ever had. 
You have all seen that engraving of John Knox 
preaching before Queen Mary, in which the black- 
robed preacher appears stretching himself over 
the pulpit in the excess of his fiery zeal, and the 
queen, clothed in white, sits below, half drawn 
away, as if on the point of flying in. terror from 
the chapel. The dark figure is in the position of a 
falcon in full flight swooping down on a helpless, 
white bird. Such were the preachers of the age 
of Burns, fearless, remorseless birds of Jove, wield- 
ing the bolts of the wrath of God with sublime 
courage and tremendous force and skill. Burns 
was thoroughly instructed in their system, as he 
shows in many ways. He was a wretch in his own 
sense, in spite of it, or as some would say, in the 

life ; but we practically found it useless as a deterrent. It always 
influenced the wrong people and in the wrong way. It caused 
'infidelity* to some, 'temptations' to others, and misery with- 
out virtue to most. The Roman Catholics are very sincere and 
' real ;' aird we found it difficult to avoid violating the conscience, 
when we told ihem to love and revere a God compromised to the 
creation of a hell of eternal vrretchedness, a God preparing what 
would be scorned as horrible by the most cruel, revengeful, and 
unjust tyrant on earth." — Life in Christy by Edward White, Pre- 
face, 3d edition. 



156 THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 

reaction from it. I have the opinion, and I give 
it only as an impression, that the system in ques- 
tion is calculated to drive those whom it does not 
command by its tremendous logic, into such stern- 
ness of opposition, that the conscience is perverted 
to do service on the side of evil. I have always 
looked on Aaron Burr as having in him something 
of the dregs of the system of his grandfather, 
Jonathan Edwards, in such wise, that I should not 
judge the one man without thinking of the other. 
I do not think that the system of Calvinism can 
be cited to demonstrate the necessity of any of its 
peculiarities, and certainly not as able to restrain 
the excesses of the vicious.^ 

11. I call your attention to another sort of fact ; 
that almost all Christian nations cannot be cited 
on the adverse side. Take the Roman Catholics 
as an illustration. They believe in the mate- 
rial fires of Dante. But they have an allevia- 

" Let me do Burns justice, by another quotation : 

— *' When to all the evil of misfortune 
This sting is added — ' Blame thy foolish self!' 
Or'worser far, the pangs of keen remorse ; 
The torturing, gnawing consciousness of guilt — 
Of guilt, perhaps, where we've involved others ; 
The young, the innocent, who fondly loved us, 
Nay, more, that very love their cause of ruin ! 
O burning hell ! in all thy store of torments 
There's not a keener lash ! " 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



157 



tion which is of the utmost consequence, in the 
idea of purgatory. Now, dropping out accidental 
matters and side questions, purgatory is the as- 
sertion of a faith, that God in the Church metes 
out every man*s punishment, after death, by the 
rule, which I have stated all along, of suiting 
it to his deeds. Now and then, a man may 
be open in their opinion, to the direct descent 
into the unchangeable infernal, but you can easily 
see, that the chance of doubt, for the majority of 
baptized persons, is of the last importance in edu- 
cating the conscience. Catholic families cannot 
know the awful suggestions which our system 
compels, except very rarely. 

Now, it follows from this, that the civilization 
of the world, so far, has not been owing in any 
great degree, to anything more than the thought, 
common to most practical Christians of all names, 
that the Judge of all the earth will do right. 
When we advance beyond that, we are not at lib- 
erty to forget the influences of the chance of 
future change, or of annihilation, of metempsy- 
chosis, or some other theory, by which the vast 
majority of men have refused to be impaled on 
the bare points of our orthodoxy. 

III. But I choose rather to decide my own 
mind by the treatment of the whole subject in the 



158 ' ^^-^ APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 

New Testament. Let us look at the text. St. 
Peter has his mind pointed to this very matter, 
the influence which the last judgment has on the 
conscience. He believed, that the long-suffering 
of God, as leading every sinner to repentance, was 
the legitimate theme of his discourse. He gives 
us a specimen of his treatment. " The day of the 
Lord will come as a thief in the night (/. ^., 
suddenly, unexpectedly), in the which the heavens 
shall pass away with a great noise and the ele- 
ments shall melt with fervent heat : the earth 
also and the works that are therein shall be 
burned up. Seeing then that all these things 
shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought 
ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, 
looking for and hasting unto the coming of the 
day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire 
shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt 
with fervent heat?'* These are the last things, the 
great fire, in which all material things shall be dis- 
solved, burnt up, and vanish away. I point you 
to the fact, that he is here exhorting not sinners 
outside to leave their gross and sensual sins and 
come to the beginning of a holy life ; but he is 
writing to sinners within, the '' beloved '' brethren 
of the Church. In other words, he uses the last 
things for those who are not wretches, for those 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 



159 



who have already in some measure left the fear of 
hell as a place of personal thought behind them. 
He says : *^ Nevertheless we, according to his 
promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, be- 
loved, seeing that ye look for such things, be dili- 
gent that ye may be found of him in peace, 
without spot and blameless. And account the 
long-suffering of our Lord, salvation.'* His be- 
loved brother Paul taught the same doctrine. He 
contrasts with the fear of God's judgment, as 
taught by the heathen, the riches of his goodness 
and forbearance and long-suffering. He asserts 
that they did not know, that the goodness of God 
leadeth to repentance. In both these cases it is 
not the wrath, but the mercies of God, which 
affect the conscience. In both of these instances7 
there is a marked absence of the warnings of the 
eternity of evil. In each, we should, in the taste 
of this age, look for mention of hell and endless- 
ness of torment. It is not found in either of 
them. But there is, what each apostle thought 
enough. Each betrays, what is the secret lever- 
age of his own conscience, and each says, what I 
do not for a moment doubt, is the real Christ- 
thought of the Gospel — the love of God, the chief 
motive-power of the conscience, is balanced by 



l6o THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 

the certainty of every man's receiving according 
to his deeds — to the seekers after immortahty; 
eternal life : but indignation and wrath, tribulation 
and anguish upon the soul of every man that 
doeth evil."^ Or as Peter has it : True men are 
found looking for the last fire to burn up this 
world, in order to make room for another new 
heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness. 

I have already claimed that the same thought 
runs through all the Saviour's teachings concern- 
ing Gehenna. He uses it to stimulate the noblest 
courage that the martyrs of the world have illus- 
trated. He uses it as the law of the survival of 
the fittest, just as the scientific mind might do 
now ; the certainty that every sin and transgres- 
sion will have its exact and due recompense of 
reward. The moment, by any artful and artificial 
introduction of the powers of mystery, you sub- 
stitute the notion of arbitrary recompense, as 
Augustine did by his fancies of imputed right- 
eousness on the one side, and of Adam's sin made 
over to all men in infinite reduplications on the 
other, you are really substituting the influence 
of superstition and mystery, where Christ left the 

* Rom. ii. 4-10. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, i6i 

healthy play of the reason and the suggestions of 
a sound conscience. Personally, I confess that I 
do not remember that I have ever avoided a temp- 
tation in my life, because of the arbitrary and 
mysterious portion of the penalties of the future. 
I do not remember either myself or any Christian 
person who may have consulted me, to have been 
specially exercised on the eternity of hell-torments, 
as a motive-power to follow after godliness and 
edification. On the other hand, I have often be- 
trayed the sentiment, that the amount of terror 
that has crept into preaching has removed the 
healthy poise of the common conscience, and put 
our piety in great jeopardy. In all other expe- 
riences of God, that we have, there is the certain 
consequence of a due recompense of reward, when 
one takes in the whole of both worlds. I have 
never committed a sin in my life that has not 
found me out, by either some penalty or the loss 
of some higher possession. And in the healthy 
conscience, the certainty of the supremacy of good- 
ness always acts as the magnetism of the far-off 
spot in the skies acts upon the needle in the com- 
pass of the mariner. Magnetic storms sweep 
fearfully over us all at times, and the needle of 
the conscience trembles and wavers off from its 
healthy center. During these excitements we see 



1 62 THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 

other strange barks fleeing hither and thither, and 
the unwise mariners would exalt the merit of the 
storms. But they pass. The vessels that ride out 
the tempests and keep nearest the track of the 
great Pilot are those over whose compass is written 
the words : ^^ Perfect love casteth out fear, for 
fear hath torment.'* Fear is a disease. It was to 
be the Great Physician to heal this disease, and to 
call men back from wandering among the tombs 
and from the society of ghosts and ghouls, that 
Christ came to dwell among men. 

Now there is another side to this subject. The 
power that holds back the criminals of the race 
from vice is the justice of government. The jus- 
tice of government is always seen in proportioning 
the penalty to the crimes. We allow a judge to 
increase the mercies of the law when a case may 
justify him in doing so, for we are Christians. 
Often pity is allowed to temper the letter of jus- 
tice. But we do not, as Christians, permit him to 
add to the penalty beyond the law. That is 
tyranny, and is hateful to every law-abiding man. 
In one community, the penalty halts after the 
crime, is doubtful, is long delayed, is avoidable by 
accidents, by political favoritism, or by corruption. 
In another State the law is swift, certain, and just. 
It is that which holds the guilty in order. But it 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



163 



is in no sense the abstract notion of the far-off 
duration of suffering. 

There is another thought which suggests itself 
just here. Take it for granted, if you please, that 
the mechanical theories of material fire, and end- 
less supernatural revivifying of the lost for purposes 
of punishment only, is allowable, for the restraint 
of the vicious members of society. Look at what 
we pay for it. The unchangeableness of the soul 
at and after death, which we consider as absolutely 
certain, is the one thing which has never been 
considered as fixed in any theology on earth, until 
these later ages. We now are keeping all the 
harsher portions of the older systems, and giving 
up that which made them tolerable. There is the 
play, therefore, of desperation in our later system, 
which maddens, rather than heals the wounds of 
guilt. Men turn against the Church, and say : 
^^ You threaten us with the ultimatum of horrors 
unless we profess certain sets of ideas, and per- 
form certain acts of symbol with you. Our char- 
acters, you tell us, have no sort of force in the 
scale. You believers are imperfect in the mart, 
in the assembly, in the home or in society, in the 
theater or in the street. We know no visible 
difference between you and us. You are good 
men, you are honest men. But on your own 



164 *^^^^ APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 

showing there is, in things that are seen, no radical 
difference between us. The difference is purely, 
mysterious and' disputed among you. Some of you 
say that the rites and the sacraments are miracu- 
lous, and that they make the difference. Some 
of you say that the act of a spasmodic conversion 
creates the character over again, and is a substi- 
tute for all else. We see you to be like ourselves, 
imperfect and unfinished. We will wait the issue, 
and we can do so and enjoy life very much as you 
do with us." This is the practical skepticism of 
the day, and we must all bear our responsibility 
for its existence. So then I argue that the idea 
of the common system in regard to hell-torments 
has not, as a matter of right or of fact, restrained 
the vicious, and that it has left the world to drift 
away from the Church, has substituted mystery 
for character, and has failed to commend the Gos- 
pel to the reason of the age. 

Let me now summarily give my own belief, as 
it has been set forth in these sermons, 

I. Negatively. I do not believe that the doc- 
trine of hell is found in the Old Testament. It 
may be true, none the less, only it is not found 
there. It came in originally into the Jewish mind 
from the heathen world, from the Persian dualism, 
and the Greek poetry. Homer and Zoroaster had 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 165 

far more to do with the scenery of it than Isaiah or 
Daniel. Light and immortality were first brought 
to light in the Gospel, and with them the opposites ; 
Gehenna and the second Death. 

II. I do not believe, in common with almost all 
systems of true Catholic theology, that the soul of 
the righteous man goes to heaven at death, or that 
the soul of the wicked man goes to hell at death. 
Inferring all that is fair from the words of Christ to 
the dyin*g robber, I suppose that the soul of a good 
man goes to Paradise ; and I believe — using the 
word in the sense of a high probability — I believe 
that the saints are in joy and felicity. I remind 
you here that Archbishop Whately, one of the best 
doctors of logic and a thoroughly read theologian, 
believed that they and all souls probably sleep till 
the resurrection. This shows us that at least mod- 
esty of statement is permitted in this matter. By 
the same process of reasoning, I infer from the po- 
etic allegory or Jewish fable of Dives and Lazarus, 
that the souls of the bad are in misery and great 
distress. But what the misery was of the man 
whom Abraham called soii^ and dissuaded from 
sending to the home of his father on a sacred mis- 
sion to try and save the souls of his brethren, I 
confess my utter inability to comprehend, or to 
reason about. I certainly do not believe them to 



1 66 ^^^ APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 

be in material fire, for they have no bodies. Their 
bodies are in the grave — turning back to dust. 
Spurgeon is compelled to invent two hells, to get 
his horrible rhetoric on. My belief stops in the 
thought that the man who could reason as well 
as Dives did of his brethren, would be the first to 
answer the question of Abraham, and confess the 
right of the Judge of all. I am utterly puzzled at 
the whole story. How Dives could be so humble 
and so much like Christ in his mercy for his breth- 
ren, and be absolutely and eternally beyond God's 
pity, I beg leave to say, passes my comprehension. 
It is one of the things that I must leave to St. 
Luke to explain — when I see him. If any man 
pushes me v/ith the scenery of the story, I turn 
on him the repeated assertions of the Old Testa- 
ment that the dead do not reason at all nor talk, 
and the common assertion of the New, that they 
sleep. In all such things, prose is before poetry, 
and facts before fables. 

III. I believe with my whole soul in the neces- 
sity and certainty of the judgment. I believe the 
scenery of it, as revealed in the Bible, to be for 
good reasons, poetic, representative, or symbolical 
— and by no means to be accepted as prose dogma. 
I do not expect to see the members of the Church 
rising again in the form of sheep or of goats : and 



THE APPEAL TO COiVSCIEXCE. 167 

it is only the Church that Christ speaks of in his 
parable, which I take to be the source of all other 
visions afterward. I do not look to hear these 
words, Come ye blessed, and Go ye cursed, as the 
whole dramatic test of a universe. For every 
man is to be judged for all the deeds done in the 
body. While as the pith and point of a pictured 
word, these sentences cover the vital principle of 
the general Gospel of Christ, they do no more. 
And so, by the same rule, I do not in my con- 
science feel the force which many good men are 
claiming for the forms of the final sentence as 
matters of fact to decide these difificulties. As 
poetry, or representative or symbolic teaching af 
two kingdoms which have been always preparing 
for that final judgment and coming to the surface 
from the beginning of the world: as ^ the recom- 
pense of the reward/ in the lines of all that has 
been done of good or ill from the beginning, I can 
accept them as most true. But I accept no more 
than they convey to my conscience, and that is the 
finality,"^^ the thoroughness, and the sufficiency of 
the last things. 

IV. I do not find any faculty in me that makes it 

* I use the ^sox^ finality only relatively to our present knowl- 
edge, not absolutely of God's plans which are beyond our com- 
prehension, and too mysterious therefore for discussion. 



1 68 THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE, 

possible for me to reason about the idea of abso- 
lute eternity. I know nothing about it. As for say- 
ing that I feel any instinct of absolute eternity for 
myself, and so make a stand on the word, as if my 
religious conscience compelled me, I do not yearn 
for any such thing. I rather hesitate at it, whether 
it is conceivable as a thing to be desired. It might 
be the ambition of a God, but not of a speck and 
molecule like me. I might be forgiven for the 
thought, but hardly for so taking it for settled and 
fixed in the nature of things, as to give me an 
argument whereby to condemn a fellow molecule. 
He that confounds the idea of absolute eternity 
with our common longing for immortality — which 
after all is non-mortality^ the longing of a soul half 
finished, full of problems half solved, burdened 
with doubts, penitences, disease, and fears ; the 
yearnings of this pzipa state, that we may yet take 
wings and soar into perfect light — has not begun to 
weigh the meaning of words. 

V. I do not, therefore, believe in the eternal ex- 
istence of evil. This is merely negation of belief, 
not assertion. It does not allow me to say, that I 
do believe in the restoration, or in the annihilation 
of the wicked, or in anything else, as an affirmative 
thought about them."^ I simply do not know 

* See Appendix A. 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 169 

enough to have an opinion. I have no faculty 
to form an opinion. If I had such an opinion, it 
would compel me, in my own mind, to reconstruct 
all the morals and teachings of divinity by it : but 
I cannot do that, for I have no faith in any propo- 
sition, and only profound faith in the same igno- 
rance of all theologians, philosophers, and dema- 
gogues, who would force us a hair-line beyond the 
words of Christ. In a-happier state of mind, pos- 
sibly than the poet, but yet proud to imitate him 
in this matter, I am willing to fall 

'* Upon the world's great altar stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God, 
And stretch lame hands of faith and grope." 

VI. I do believe practically and as a necessity, 
in all that lies in the word Gehenna, used on four 
occasions, by the Incarnate Love of God. It is 
the assertion of the one great law, after which we 
are groping now, of the survival of the fittest, the 
dissolution of all evil and abortion, the perishing 
of all failures and reprobates ; the final triumph of 
all good. I am willing to see the scenery of Sinai 
gather around that valley of Tsal-Maveth or death- 
shade ; to stand with Elias, and hear the thunder- 
storms roll over it ; to feel the hot samiel wind as 
it sweeps scorchingly by from the southern desert ; 
to find the air grow thick with ghosts from Sodom, 



170 THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 

and troops of bat-winged demons from Persia, led 
by the evil god Ahriman, and to see that '' Arch- 
angel in ruins," who once did sit upon a throne, 
^^ that far outshone the wealth of Ormus and of 
Ind," with all his peers : and the two living mon- 
sters Death and Hell led thither in chains. They 
gather at the mouth of the bottomless pit, which 
the superior imagination of Milton has made with 
ever still another deep. They stand by a lake of 
fire, that tells of a worn-out world in flames. 
They perish with it. 

What is beyond, I am not commissioned to tell. 
I have seen the everlasting fires of Sodom go out, 
and the sunshine over Bahr Lut is as bright as be- 
fore. I hear Moses behind the clouds, telling us 
that all there is goodness and mercy. I hear now 
only that ' still, small voice,' which came after the 
earthquake and the storm, and awed the pro- 
phet's soul as he rolled his sorrows upon God. 

Are you dissatisfied at this oft-repeated confes- 

« 

sion of my ignorance? This, in my. judgment, is 
the half-shadow of Scripture, and here we may 
safely declare that faith ends in thick darkness. 
My commission is, as I think St. Peter saw his to 
be, to teach the Gospel on its positive side. The 
justice of God is now pure and perfect, and be- 
yond our grasp. The length, and breadth, and 



THE APPEAL TO CONSCIENCE. 



171 



depth, and height of his love now pass our knowl- 
edge. The judgments of the last day will be 
thorough and final and perfect, as all else is with 
him ; and the scenery is designedly full of warn- 
ing. Let our work be, so to live that we may have 
the light of. God in our hearts, and escape the 
disease of horrors, which always gathers around 
the thought of evil. Thus we may learn to trust 
our loved ones to the bosom of the Infinite Father, 
and wait, till in his Light we can see light. 



APPENDIX A. 



We are so habituated, in matters of divinity, to take 
oit-TQ^edlQd probabilities as settled axioms, and thereupon 
to reason on them, as if every element of doubt had been 
eliminated, and the merely probable changed into the 
absolutely known^ that most persons often find them- 
selves asking questions which really allow no satisfactory 
answers, as matters of pure intellect. The answers can 
be only of the nature of the premises — a probability, 
more or less conjectural. They must lie in half-shadow. 
They are matters of feeling rather than knowledge. 

Thus I am obliged to consider the questions which 
here start up and somewhat imperiously demand an 
answer as if the asking them were itself a satisfactory 
condemnation of my statements : 

I. Are sinners, at the Day of Judgment, annihilated, 
or are they restored to the life of the good ? 

II. Are not the two sides of the sentence of that day 
co-equal as to duration — eternal life and eternal death — 
by the very language, and in the nature of things ? 

I reply, I. The whole subject of the last things belongs 
to faith ^ and not to knowledge. No one can reason on 
them finally, unless he sees and knows the whole field 
of vision. No words can convey the whole field of vision 
to us. God only can know all that belongs to it. By 
faith we can know, after a sort, the things which demand 
solution from our side of it, namely, the end of opposition 



174 APPENDIX A. 

to God, the punishment of rebellion, and the destruction 
of evil. 

It is very hard for the religious dogmatists of our 
times to comprehend the state of mind which resolutely 
refuses to have a?iy opinion where one has no sort of knowl- 
edge. We have no sort of knowledge of any eternal 
fire, either material or immaterial, which depends for its 
element of eternity on the supersensual facts which the 
common theory considers as the axioms of its fearful 
science. The world in which we are living confounds us 
now in many things, but we must think of it, and we 
think according to the laws which it imposes on us. 
That the nature of fire now is to burn up, and that it is 
used in the Scripture in its natural sense, are convictions 
which both nature and mercy incline us to accept. 
AVhat it may possibly symbolize beyond the natural 
kingdom, in other worlds, wher.e eye and ear and " heart 
of man " have no possible knowledge, as I look at the 
Bible, no one can determine. Any theory which offers 
to tell us can only be a probability at the last, as it be- 
gins with such conjectural material at the start. The 
real question is, what theory has most of probability, 
as the true interpretation of the words of Christ, that we 
are in doubt about. Persian dualism with its evil god, 
classic mythology with its Homeric Tartarus, and the 
science, falsely so called, of the first centuries, would 
seem to give one theory the highest degree of probable 
authority. But the dualism has ceased to command 
attention ; the dreams of the Greek and Latin poets are 
rejected as the diseased fancies of terror ; and science 
has destroyed every inclination to accept that theory 
now. The probability is quite on the other side. I hold 
it still as probability on either side, and refuse to have 



APPENDIX A, 



175 



an opinion. If I am right in limiting the objects of 
revelation to the "end," when God ''shall be all in all/' 
then, as is said in the body of the discourse, it is an 
intrusion of philosophy into subjects unrevealed, to dog- 
matize on these questions. 

My objection to any further expression of opinion 
about the annihilation or restoration of the lost is among 
others, this : that it reflexively demands a reconstruction 
of theosophy and ethics. If a relentless logic would 
attempt to force one on either proposition, in order to 
escape the idea of a cruel vengeance in the Divine 
Heart, which requires the absolute everlastingness and 
endlessness of evil in its most hateful form, that is, the 
eternal suffering, and hell-torments of those who can no 
longer resist, nor be allowed to cease being the one blot 
of nature ; then I take deliberately the position, that the 
real dilemma is, the Augustinian decree or madness^ and 
I hold the latter side to be preferable. 

II. As to the other proposition, which to judge by 
the confident manner of its announcement by the un- 
thinking, seems to be settled in their minds by its mere 
statement — that, if the Life is eternal, the Death must 
be eternal, and if the Death is in any way limited, the 
Life is necessarily limited — suppose for a moment that 
we accept it. We allow it to be so. What then ? Are 
the righteous robbed of anything which they can claim 
as ^ their own by right? Or to call in that sublimer 
thought, which tells us that Christ left the abodes of 
bliss, and shrunk himself into the form of a servant 
(Phil, ii.j, and, then that the Man who " knew no 
sin " was wiUing to become " a curse " for us : the thought 
which ennobled Moses in his day, who prayed to Jeho- 
vah, " if not — then blot me out of thy book : " which 



1^6 APPENDIX A, 

throbbed as a ruling power of life in St. Paul, willing 
to be ^^ accursed for his brethren according to the flesh ; " 
the thought which has infused into all true hearts a pro- 
founder conviction of the majesty of goodness, and is 
lifting us as a race and as individuals nearer heaven ; 
would it be inconsistent with that thought, if we should 
grant the proposition, and rejoice to lose all, if thereby 
others could be saved from infinite, endless torments ? 
Put the question to a Christian wife or mother : would 
you be willing to submit to a lingering death of great 
and prolonged suffering now, if thereby a husband or a 
son could be rescued from final condemnation ? and her 
answer would be like that of Moses, ^' Yet now, if thou 
wilt forgive their sins : and if not — blot me, I pray thee, 
out of thy book which thou hast written." * Shall then 
a Christian woman be more merciful than her Crea- 
tor, or more self-forgetful than her Saviour ? If we are 
forced by the sublimer instincts of faith to this rule 
of judgment in this temporal life, what is there that 
makes it impracticable in the other, the far-off case ? 
Is the thought of annihilation so dreadful ? Then the 
surrender is the more sublime. We cannot doubt of this 
instinct, if we remember the strong words of St. Paul 
in the mature opinion of one of his later epistles 
(Rom. ix.), and the conviction of every true heart that 
he was never nearer heaven, than when he said it of his 
unbelieving, persecuting, and hateful brethren and kijis- 
folk. 

But there is no need of accepting any such dilemma. 
Life and death are not intrinsically the same. Death is 
the negation of life. Literally eternal life is eternal being. 



^ Exod. xxxii. 32. 



APPENDIX A. 



177 



living and loving. Eternal death is a paradoxical and 
contradictory eternal not-being. In the purely imagina- 
tive (parabolic) words of Christ the two sides of that 
finality are presented scenically. The one side is life — 
a substantial thing — a condition of existence and dura- 
tion, with capacity of perpetuity. It is. It endures of 
itself, until some limit is put to it. The other side is 
deaths or not-existing^ a negation of life and ending /;/ se- 
ipso, " Rachel mourned for her children because they 
were not!' 

The scenery of the parable of Matt. xxv. 31-46, is 
highly imaginative, is poetic, symbolic, and representa- 
tive, and must be so treated. 

(a!) No one expects to find mankind rising as *' sheep " 
and '^ goats," nor to see a shepherd-king seated upon a 
white throne. The scenery is arbitrary, and suggestive 
of what shall be in the final, inconceivable world, when 
at last every knee shall bov/ to Jesus, and every tongue 
shall confess him to be Lord. 

(^.) The trial-tests are symbolical or representative, 
/. ^., are poetical, by that old system of poetry in pic- 
tured words which began on the shores of the Nile, 
and had been adopted by every prophet of Israel. 
They appeal to the imagination through the senses, 
and must be accepted and interpreted by the heart. 
No one expects to hear the entire history of a world, 
and of every man, woman, and child in it ; yea, and of 
infants who have never visited the sick or seen the 
inside of a prison ; of idiots and madmen, who have 
shared no touches of a responsible conscience of mercy, 
judged by that rule, and consigned dramatically to one 
side or the other in two terse sentences of judgment. 
St. John had no hesitation in expanding this language 



178 



APPENDIX A, 



of Christ into a royal assize, with ^^ the judgment set/' 
the books opened, and men judged by the things which 
were written in them. They were three — the Book of 
the Law, the Book of Remembrance, and the Census of 
the Holy City. He sees the trial proceed in due order, 
and treats this vision and parable as poetic. 

(<:.) The Sentences must be accepted as a part of 
this parabolic teaching; that is, as suggestive. We 
look on the picture and we micse on its indicia. When 
the righteous are called to inherit a kingdom prepared 
for them from the beginning of the world, we drea77i of 
'' a Beatific Vision '' of ineffable glory, of permanent, 
enduring vitality. Catholic divinity refuses to map off 
the exact lines of it, or put in a plea for an irreversible 
fee-simple claim in that city, whose length, and breadth, 
and height are equal. When the wicked are called 
the " cursed " {Kanjpapievoi^ the devoted, a word 
which was brought in from Deut. xxi. 23, of bodies 
hanged on a tree), and sent away into^^ everlasting fire, 
prepared for the devil and his angels," it is still poetic. 
As we must depart from all prose laws of speech and 
science, to make the fire immaterial and capable of 
burning spirits ; to wit, the devil and his angels ; so we 
may surely refuse to transfer the " everlasting '' from 
the fire to the goats. St. John, as I regard it, has para- 
phrased it " This is the Secoitd Death ; " and death is not 
life ; death is fiot-being. 

{d.) The words which follow, namely, "everlasting 
Jfums/iment," KoXaaiv aiGoviov^ at first seem to imply 
a perpetuity of the discipline. The imagination can 
hardly conceive of an " ageless pruning, or an endless 
mutilation." The idea of punishment comes in second- 
arily, and carries with it the sense of discipline to reform. 



APPENDIX A, 



179 



the subject. We give these words the force of the 
others which preceded, and stop with the fact that the 
aioDviov is said of the fire and not of the subjects. 
For the argument on which we are employed just here, 
it is enough to insist that the coequahty of the two fates 
does not depend on the use of the one word eternal^ but 
on the intrinsic nature of two conditions, considered in 
themselves. Life may be eternal. But death, if any- 
thing is meant by the word, that we now can conceive 
from things which are now known to us, is not in se 
capable of duration. It will require a transubstantia- 
tion, or metamorphosis of quaHties, to become so. 

And, after all, what is eternal life ? Christ once de- 
fined it, and here is his definition : '' And this is life 
eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, 
and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John, xvii. 3.) 
I am accustomed to think of this as having no necessary 
connection with our ideas of time. It begins now in this 
present life, before the judgment, and is intrinsically in- 
dependent of it. Its duration cannot depend upon the 
rhetorical accident of coming for once into contrast with 
its opposite. 

After all that is said upon the philosophy of these 
thinkings and reasonings of the mind here in this dark 
and bafiiing world, I am willing to stop and make a 
stand on the utter refusal, which I have made again and 
again, to have any theory. One thing is a solemn duty 
— to use all diligence to be on the right hand of the 
Judge — to believe that I shall lov6 Christ then, and see 
him to be "the Just One," the same as now — to account 
the long-suffering of God my or any one's salvation, 
and to preach the Gospel of Love as the motive to re- 
pentance now. The Rock of Ages is under foot now. 



l8o APPENDIX A. 

The night is black-dark around, that marks to me the 
limits of religious thought. Let who will peer over the 
edge of the precipice, and terrify himself and others 
with old pagan phantoms which have passed current 
as orthodox, long after the original fancies under them 
have perished. I do not in my heart feel afraid of 
their terror. I beHeve that the God of Nature is also 
the God of the Bible, and that he is revealed in both 
books, and not wholly in either. I am willing to be a 
fool in things which transcend the intellect, and twice a 
fool in dogmas that defy all known laws of God's great 
creation and just government. Let any man show me 
in all the realms of nature what thing God ever made 
and kept in unwilling being, simply to gratify himself 
in its anguish, and I will begin to regard his reasoning 
— and become less a Christian as I do so. Let any 
one show me how that which in man is simply detest- 
able and horrible, can become lovely and desirable in 
the Creator, and I will look to our insane asylums to 
find which of them is to be preferred as his true Church. 
I will stand still and wait, where I am now, satisfied in 
the maxim — scire quod nescias. 



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